https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...6deb18cca19_story.html?utm_term=.f3e6e8ba83cf
Pence pouring cold water on warming ties between 2 Koreas
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Abe’s official residence in Tokyo, Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018. (Shizuo Kambayashi, Pool/Associated Press)
By Zeke Miller | AP February 7 at 11:53 PM
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is pouring cold water on the warming ties between North and South Korea just as the two still-warring countries are joining up to compete together in the Winter Olympics.
Making his way to Pyeongchang to lead the U.S. delegation to Friday’s opening ceremonies, Pence has embarked on a set of symbolic visits designed to draw attention to the North’s terrible human rights record and nuclear aggression. With determined rhetoric — and the promise of more “aggressive” economic sanctions against the North — Pence is looking to refocus American allies on the North Korean threat.
“We will not allow North Korea to hide behind the Olympic banner the reality that they enslave their people and threaten the wider region,” Pence said Wednesday after meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo.
Pence arrives in Seoul on Thursday for meetings with President Moon Jae-in just as South Korea seizes on the games for a diplomatic opening with the North, including the first visit of North Korea’s ruling family since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Aides say the vice president is advancing a counter message, using the games as an opportunity for the South and the broader international community to exert what President Donald Trump has termed “maximum pressure” against the North.
Before departing for Korea, Pence announced that the U.S. would unveil in coming days “the toughest and most aggressive round of economic sanctions on North Korea ever.”
He also ratcheted up his rhetoric on the North’s human rights abuses in a speech to U.S. service members at Yokota Air Base in Japan.
“As we speak, an estimated 100,000 North Korean citizens labor in modern-day gulags,” Pence said Thursday before departing Japan. “Those who dare raise their voices in dissent are imprisoned, tortured and even murdered, and their children and grandchildren are routinely punished for their family’s sins against the state.”
Pence toured joint U.S. and Japanese operations centers at the U.S. base that monitor and react to crises on the peninsula and the region at large. He told troops to “be vigilant,” warning against falling for the North’s diplomatic overtures. “We are ready for every eventuality,” he added.
Pence’s strenuous efforts to highlight the threat from the North and its treatment of its people present a dilemma for Moon. The South Korean leader has long advocated engagement with Pyongyang and sees the Olympics as an opportunity to quell tensions that have escalated over its nuclear program. He has limited room to maneuver as his guest from Washington strongly criticizes the North and emphasizes the need to crank up the pressure campaign.
U.S. officials declined to offer details on the expected new sanctions beyond Pence’s comments, citing concerns that any additional information could be used by those trying to skirt the new measures. They are expected to be implemented before the conclusion of the games.
North Korea already is facing unprecedented sanctions after three U.N. Security Council restrictions in the past year that have slashed the pariah nation’s export revenue and capped fuel imports. Unilaterally, the U.S. has also targeted North Korean shipping companies and Chinese trading networks. A potential escalation of sanctions could be the U.S. blacklisting Chinese banks accused of providing North Korea access to the international financial system and facilitating sanctions evasion.
Administration officials said they had long expected the North would seek to use the Olympics, taking place just 50 miles from the heavily-mined demilitarized zone, as an opportunity to put a softer face on the regime, and painted Pence’s visit as a counterbalance to those efforts. At the same time, the vice president has deliberately left the door open to a possible encounter with North Korean officials expected to be in attendance.
On Wednesday, the North announced that Kim Yo Jong, the sister of dictator Kim Jong-un, would attend the games, joining the country’s nominal head of state, Kim Yong Nam.
Pence pledged that his message in any potential interaction would include the same point he has been making publicly: that the North must renounce its nuclear weapon and missile programs.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters Wednesday that Pence is “quite capable of making the call” on whether to meet with North Korean officials at the Olympics. Asked if war with North Korea is closer than when Trump took office a year ago, Mattis said U.S. policy is “firmly in the diplomatic lane,” as shown by agreement among world powers to increase sanctions. He added that the policy is backed by “viable military options.”
Pence began his trip with a visit to Alaska, where he received a briefing on the U.S. missile defense system with U.S. Northern Command and highlighted the upcoming deployment of an additional 20 ground-based interceptors that will be ready to respond to a North Korean launch. In Japan, Pence watched Japanese troops demonstrate the simulated deployment of Japan’s surface-to-air missile defense system, which would attempt to intercept a North Korean missile. He also participated in a briefing at Japan’s Ministry of Defense on the threat.
Abe echoed Pence’s comments through a translator, urging countries “not to be lured by the charm offensive of North Korea.” Abe added that the U.S. and Japan are “100 percent on the same page” on North Korean policy. The U.S., Japan, and South Korea are set to hold trilateral talks later this week
In South Korea, Pence will meet Friday morning with North Korean defectors as he pays respects at the Cheonan Memorial in Seoul, which honors the 46 South Korean sailors killed in a 2010 torpedo attack attributed to the North.
Pence’s personal guest at the games will be Fred Warmbier, the father of Otto Warmbier, an American who died last year days after his release from captivity in North Korea.
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Associated Press writer Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/world/asia/olympics-north-korea-joint-team.html
Two Koreas, Split by War, Use Olympics to Make Rare Shows of Unity
By CHOE SANG-HUNFEB. 8, 2018
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North and South Korea have formed a joint team in women’s ice hockey for the Pyeongchang Olympics. The combined squad played an exhibition match against Sweden on Sunday. Credit Woohae Cho/Getty Images
SEOUL, South Korea — The first time South Korea hosted an Olympics — in 1988 in its capital, Seoul — the International Olympic Committee invited North Korea to talks in advance. The North Koreans showed up with a list of demands.
They not only insisted that half the events be held in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, but they also wanted top billing, pressing for the Games to be renamed the Pyongyang-Seoul Summer Olympics, with the opening ceremony in Pyongyang. When South Korea said no, the North Koreans refused to attend.
“If one gives one finger to North Korea, they will take the whole hand,” the South Korean leader, Chun Doo-hwan, told I.O.C. President Juan Antonio Samaranch in 1986.
It’s a different picture three decades later, as South Korea prepares to host its second Olympics. The North Koreans are not only joining, their athletes will also march with the South Koreans in the opening ceremony and compete side by side in the Koreas’ first joint Olympic team, in women’s ice hockey.
The turnaround underscores the changed role that the Olympics have come to play in the tense relations between the two Koreas, which never signed a peace treaty to end the 1950-53 Korean War. For years, the rival Koreas used the Games to showcase their competing claims to represent the Korean people, and try to one up each other.
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More recently, however, the North and South have come to see international sporting events as a chance to defuse tensions, including the current standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The two Koreas have also learned to use Olympic diplomacy to achieve in a small, symbolic way a much bigger goal that eludes them in the real world: a show of unity across the divided Korean Peninsula.
“It is not an impossible dream,” South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, said at the United Nations in September. He said the coming Olympics, which are being held in the South Korean resort of Pyeongchang, “will become a candle that sheds light on peace.”
Photo
North Korea’s Kim Un-hyang against Sweden on Sunday. Team Korea was created by adding 12 North Korean players to the existing South Korean squad. Credit Woohae Cho/Getty Images
Even the limited show of cooperation during the Pyeongchang Olympics is the culmination of a long process of sports rapprochement that has tracked the ups and downs of the larger political relationship between the two Koreas. No evidence has surfaced of the wealthy South paying off its impoverished neighbor in exchange for Olympic cooperation, but the advances have come at times when the South was more forthcoming with aid and investment.
Last year, the administration of Mr. Moon offered to donate $8 million to two United Nations humanitarian programs working in North Korea. Mr. Moon suspended the plan after international pushback that the offer might undermine United Nations sanctions against the North’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
In Pyeongchang, South Korea will pay for the joint uniforms to be worn by athletes of both sides during the opening ceremony, and foot the bill for housing and feeding hundreds of North Korean dancers and cultural entertainers who will perform during the Games. However, no money will go directly to them, South Korean officials have said.
The North Koreans are also likely to be the only athletes not to receive a free smartphone from the Olympic sponsor Samsung. South Korean officials said they were keen to dispel concerns, particularly in Washington, that they were making payments to the North that could violate sanctions.
“We are trying to brief the Americans so thoroughly about every detail of matters concerning sanctions and the North Korean delegation that they get tired of hearing it,” said Cho Myoung-gyon, who as South Korea’s unification minister is in charge of dealings with the North.
The I.O.C. first urged North and South Korean sports officials to meet in 1963, a time when East and West Germany had created a joint Olympic squad. But the two Koreas could get no further than deciding that a hypothetical joint squad would use a well-known Korean folk song, “Arirang,” instead of picking one of their national anthems.
They agreed to talk again before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. But when they met on their shared border, the heavily fortified demilitarized zone, the talks quickly devolved into mutual recriminations. South Korea demanded that the North apologize for its bombing of Mr. Chun’s presidential delegation in Burma the previous year, which killed 17 South Koreans, while North Korea called Mr. Chun a “bloody-handed” dictator for ordering the massacre of protesters in the city of Kwangju in 1980.
Photo
Fans waving flags that show an undivided Korean Peninsula. Credit Pool photo by Woohae Cho
“It was nothing but a slandering match,” said Lim Tae-sun, 83, a former South Korean negotiator who was present at the meeting. “We hardly discussed the real agenda.”
In 1985, the I.O.C. invited the two Koreas to Lausanne, Switzerland, in an attempt to broker an end to North Korea’s bitter campaign against the 1988 Summer Games awarded to Seoul. The North insisted on sharing the Games, arguing that “hosting of the Games by one part of the nation aggravated the antagonism and division between the two peoples.”
It also made veiled threats, telling a visiting I.O.C. vice president that “any accidental error would have disastrous effects on the peaceful celebration of the Games.”
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The first breakthrough came at the end of the Cold War, when the two Koreas agreed in 1991 to form a joint team for the World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan.
Under the deal, the two governments agreed that the unified team would use the name Korea, and carry a blue-and-white flag showing an undivided Korean Peninsula. The South also made a key concession, agreeing that each Korea should contribute the same number of players.
The brief sports détente came to an abrupt end that same year when a North Korean attending a judo championship in Barcelona, Spain, defected to South Korea. The North receded into deeper isolation during a devastating famine.
Photo
Sarah Ruth Murray, the head coach of Team Korea. She is required to select three North Korean players to play in each match. Credit Pool photo by Woohae Cho
In the late 1990s, South Korea persuaded the North to resume sports exchanges with the help of economic aid from a private citizen, Chung Ju-yung, the billionaire founder of South Korea’s Hyundai conglomerate. In 1999, the two Koreas played friendly basketball matches in Pyongyang and Seoul after ground was broken for an arena Mr. Chung donated in the North Korean capital.
Sports exchanges flourished as the two Koreas achieved a political rapprochement during the early 2000s, when liberal administrations in South Korea pursued a Sunshine Policy of promoting warmer ties backed by generous offers of aid and investment. The two Koreas marched together in the Olympic opening ceremonies in 2000, 2004 and 2006.
But even during these years, a joint Olympic team remained out of reach. South Korean athletes objected to relinquishing their hard-won spots. Coaches said the two Koreas remained just too far apart in thinking, training and abilities.
“I find it hard to imagine archers from the two Koreas competing on the same team,” Seo Keo-won, an executive at the Korea Archery Association in Seoul, said at the time.
The sports diplomacy froze in 2008 as a new conservative government in Seoul limited ties with the North, refusing to turn a blind eye to its weapons programs. Talks to field a joint team at the Summer Games that year in Beijing collapsed after the South rejected the North’s condition of equal numbers of athletes.
This year’s deal came after Mr. Moon, a political liberal who has expressed eagerness to restore inter-Korean exchanges, took office last May. The North also showed flexibility in agreeing to a joint squad in women’s hockey, one of the few winter team sports in which it competes.
The joint team was created by adding 12 North Koreans to the existing South Korean national team of 23 players. The head coach is a Canadian appointed by South Korea, who must select at least three North Koreans to play in each game.
South Korean officials say they did not promise aid for the deal. But they did make one important concession: postponing joint military exercises with the United States.
“Sports exchanges can prosper only when political issues are resolved,” said Chang Ung, a North Korean member of the I.O.C., after landing in Seoul this week. “That is an unbreakable rule on the divided Korean Peninsula.”
Pence pouring cold water on warming ties between 2 Koreas
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Abe’s official residence in Tokyo, Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018. (Shizuo Kambayashi, Pool/Associated Press)
By Zeke Miller | AP February 7 at 11:53 PM
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is pouring cold water on the warming ties between North and South Korea just as the two still-warring countries are joining up to compete together in the Winter Olympics.
Making his way to Pyeongchang to lead the U.S. delegation to Friday’s opening ceremonies, Pence has embarked on a set of symbolic visits designed to draw attention to the North’s terrible human rights record and nuclear aggression. With determined rhetoric — and the promise of more “aggressive” economic sanctions against the North — Pence is looking to refocus American allies on the North Korean threat.
“We will not allow North Korea to hide behind the Olympic banner the reality that they enslave their people and threaten the wider region,” Pence said Wednesday after meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo.
Pence arrives in Seoul on Thursday for meetings with President Moon Jae-in just as South Korea seizes on the games for a diplomatic opening with the North, including the first visit of North Korea’s ruling family since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Aides say the vice president is advancing a counter message, using the games as an opportunity for the South and the broader international community to exert what President Donald Trump has termed “maximum pressure” against the North.
Before departing for Korea, Pence announced that the U.S. would unveil in coming days “the toughest and most aggressive round of economic sanctions on North Korea ever.”
He also ratcheted up his rhetoric on the North’s human rights abuses in a speech to U.S. service members at Yokota Air Base in Japan.
“As we speak, an estimated 100,000 North Korean citizens labor in modern-day gulags,” Pence said Thursday before departing Japan. “Those who dare raise their voices in dissent are imprisoned, tortured and even murdered, and their children and grandchildren are routinely punished for their family’s sins against the state.”
Pence toured joint U.S. and Japanese operations centers at the U.S. base that monitor and react to crises on the peninsula and the region at large. He told troops to “be vigilant,” warning against falling for the North’s diplomatic overtures. “We are ready for every eventuality,” he added.
Pence’s strenuous efforts to highlight the threat from the North and its treatment of its people present a dilemma for Moon. The South Korean leader has long advocated engagement with Pyongyang and sees the Olympics as an opportunity to quell tensions that have escalated over its nuclear program. He has limited room to maneuver as his guest from Washington strongly criticizes the North and emphasizes the need to crank up the pressure campaign.
U.S. officials declined to offer details on the expected new sanctions beyond Pence’s comments, citing concerns that any additional information could be used by those trying to skirt the new measures. They are expected to be implemented before the conclusion of the games.
North Korea already is facing unprecedented sanctions after three U.N. Security Council restrictions in the past year that have slashed the pariah nation’s export revenue and capped fuel imports. Unilaterally, the U.S. has also targeted North Korean shipping companies and Chinese trading networks. A potential escalation of sanctions could be the U.S. blacklisting Chinese banks accused of providing North Korea access to the international financial system and facilitating sanctions evasion.
Administration officials said they had long expected the North would seek to use the Olympics, taking place just 50 miles from the heavily-mined demilitarized zone, as an opportunity to put a softer face on the regime, and painted Pence’s visit as a counterbalance to those efforts. At the same time, the vice president has deliberately left the door open to a possible encounter with North Korean officials expected to be in attendance.
On Wednesday, the North announced that Kim Yo Jong, the sister of dictator Kim Jong-un, would attend the games, joining the country’s nominal head of state, Kim Yong Nam.
Pence pledged that his message in any potential interaction would include the same point he has been making publicly: that the North must renounce its nuclear weapon and missile programs.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters Wednesday that Pence is “quite capable of making the call” on whether to meet with North Korean officials at the Olympics. Asked if war with North Korea is closer than when Trump took office a year ago, Mattis said U.S. policy is “firmly in the diplomatic lane,” as shown by agreement among world powers to increase sanctions. He added that the policy is backed by “viable military options.”
Pence began his trip with a visit to Alaska, where he received a briefing on the U.S. missile defense system with U.S. Northern Command and highlighted the upcoming deployment of an additional 20 ground-based interceptors that will be ready to respond to a North Korean launch. In Japan, Pence watched Japanese troops demonstrate the simulated deployment of Japan’s surface-to-air missile defense system, which would attempt to intercept a North Korean missile. He also participated in a briefing at Japan’s Ministry of Defense on the threat.
Abe echoed Pence’s comments through a translator, urging countries “not to be lured by the charm offensive of North Korea.” Abe added that the U.S. and Japan are “100 percent on the same page” on North Korean policy. The U.S., Japan, and South Korea are set to hold trilateral talks later this week
In South Korea, Pence will meet Friday morning with North Korean defectors as he pays respects at the Cheonan Memorial in Seoul, which honors the 46 South Korean sailors killed in a 2010 torpedo attack attributed to the North.
Pence’s personal guest at the games will be Fred Warmbier, the father of Otto Warmbier, an American who died last year days after his release from captivity in North Korea.
Today's WorldView newsletter
What's most important from where the world meets Washington
___
Associated Press writer Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/world/asia/olympics-north-korea-joint-team.html
Two Koreas, Split by War, Use Olympics to Make Rare Shows of Unity
By CHOE SANG-HUNFEB. 8, 2018
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North and South Korea have formed a joint team in women’s ice hockey for the Pyeongchang Olympics. The combined squad played an exhibition match against Sweden on Sunday. Credit Woohae Cho/Getty Images
SEOUL, South Korea — The first time South Korea hosted an Olympics — in 1988 in its capital, Seoul — the International Olympic Committee invited North Korea to talks in advance. The North Koreans showed up with a list of demands.
They not only insisted that half the events be held in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, but they also wanted top billing, pressing for the Games to be renamed the Pyongyang-Seoul Summer Olympics, with the opening ceremony in Pyongyang. When South Korea said no, the North Koreans refused to attend.
“If one gives one finger to North Korea, they will take the whole hand,” the South Korean leader, Chun Doo-hwan, told I.O.C. President Juan Antonio Samaranch in 1986.
It’s a different picture three decades later, as South Korea prepares to host its second Olympics. The North Koreans are not only joining, their athletes will also march with the South Koreans in the opening ceremony and compete side by side in the Koreas’ first joint Olympic team, in women’s ice hockey.
The turnaround underscores the changed role that the Olympics have come to play in the tense relations between the two Koreas, which never signed a peace treaty to end the 1950-53 Korean War. For years, the rival Koreas used the Games to showcase their competing claims to represent the Korean people, and try to one up each other.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
Olympic Dreams of a United Korea? Many in South Say, ‘No, Thanks’ JAN. 28, 2018
North and South Korean Teams to March as One at Olympics JAN. 17, 2018
North Korea Cancels Pre-Olympic Event, Blaming South Korean Media JAN. 29, 2018
For South Korea’s Hockey Women, Unity With North Is a Bitter Burden JAN. 22, 2018
Continue reading the main story
More recently, however, the North and South have come to see international sporting events as a chance to defuse tensions, including the current standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The two Koreas have also learned to use Olympic diplomacy to achieve in a small, symbolic way a much bigger goal that eludes them in the real world: a show of unity across the divided Korean Peninsula.
“It is not an impossible dream,” South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, said at the United Nations in September. He said the coming Olympics, which are being held in the South Korean resort of Pyeongchang, “will become a candle that sheds light on peace.”
Photo
North Korea’s Kim Un-hyang against Sweden on Sunday. Team Korea was created by adding 12 North Korean players to the existing South Korean squad. Credit Woohae Cho/Getty Images
Even the limited show of cooperation during the Pyeongchang Olympics is the culmination of a long process of sports rapprochement that has tracked the ups and downs of the larger political relationship between the two Koreas. No evidence has surfaced of the wealthy South paying off its impoverished neighbor in exchange for Olympic cooperation, but the advances have come at times when the South was more forthcoming with aid and investment.
Last year, the administration of Mr. Moon offered to donate $8 million to two United Nations humanitarian programs working in North Korea. Mr. Moon suspended the plan after international pushback that the offer might undermine United Nations sanctions against the North’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
In Pyeongchang, South Korea will pay for the joint uniforms to be worn by athletes of both sides during the opening ceremony, and foot the bill for housing and feeding hundreds of North Korean dancers and cultural entertainers who will perform during the Games. However, no money will go directly to them, South Korean officials have said.
The North Koreans are also likely to be the only athletes not to receive a free smartphone from the Olympic sponsor Samsung. South Korean officials said they were keen to dispel concerns, particularly in Washington, that they were making payments to the North that could violate sanctions.
“We are trying to brief the Americans so thoroughly about every detail of matters concerning sanctions and the North Korean delegation that they get tired of hearing it,” said Cho Myoung-gyon, who as South Korea’s unification minister is in charge of dealings with the North.
The I.O.C. first urged North and South Korean sports officials to meet in 1963, a time when East and West Germany had created a joint Olympic squad. But the two Koreas could get no further than deciding that a hypothetical joint squad would use a well-known Korean folk song, “Arirang,” instead of picking one of their national anthems.
They agreed to talk again before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. But when they met on their shared border, the heavily fortified demilitarized zone, the talks quickly devolved into mutual recriminations. South Korea demanded that the North apologize for its bombing of Mr. Chun’s presidential delegation in Burma the previous year, which killed 17 South Koreans, while North Korea called Mr. Chun a “bloody-handed” dictator for ordering the massacre of protesters in the city of Kwangju in 1980.
Photo
Fans waving flags that show an undivided Korean Peninsula. Credit Pool photo by Woohae Cho
“It was nothing but a slandering match,” said Lim Tae-sun, 83, a former South Korean negotiator who was present at the meeting. “We hardly discussed the real agenda.”
In 1985, the I.O.C. invited the two Koreas to Lausanne, Switzerland, in an attempt to broker an end to North Korea’s bitter campaign against the 1988 Summer Games awarded to Seoul. The North insisted on sharing the Games, arguing that “hosting of the Games by one part of the nation aggravated the antagonism and division between the two peoples.”
It also made veiled threats, telling a visiting I.O.C. vice president that “any accidental error would have disastrous effects on the peaceful celebration of the Games.”
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The first breakthrough came at the end of the Cold War, when the two Koreas agreed in 1991 to form a joint team for the World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan.
Under the deal, the two governments agreed that the unified team would use the name Korea, and carry a blue-and-white flag showing an undivided Korean Peninsula. The South also made a key concession, agreeing that each Korea should contribute the same number of players.
The brief sports détente came to an abrupt end that same year when a North Korean attending a judo championship in Barcelona, Spain, defected to South Korea. The North receded into deeper isolation during a devastating famine.
Photo
Sarah Ruth Murray, the head coach of Team Korea. She is required to select three North Korean players to play in each match. Credit Pool photo by Woohae Cho
In the late 1990s, South Korea persuaded the North to resume sports exchanges with the help of economic aid from a private citizen, Chung Ju-yung, the billionaire founder of South Korea’s Hyundai conglomerate. In 1999, the two Koreas played friendly basketball matches in Pyongyang and Seoul after ground was broken for an arena Mr. Chung donated in the North Korean capital.
Sports exchanges flourished as the two Koreas achieved a political rapprochement during the early 2000s, when liberal administrations in South Korea pursued a Sunshine Policy of promoting warmer ties backed by generous offers of aid and investment. The two Koreas marched together in the Olympic opening ceremonies in 2000, 2004 and 2006.
But even during these years, a joint Olympic team remained out of reach. South Korean athletes objected to relinquishing their hard-won spots. Coaches said the two Koreas remained just too far apart in thinking, training and abilities.
“I find it hard to imagine archers from the two Koreas competing on the same team,” Seo Keo-won, an executive at the Korea Archery Association in Seoul, said at the time.
The sports diplomacy froze in 2008 as a new conservative government in Seoul limited ties with the North, refusing to turn a blind eye to its weapons programs. Talks to field a joint team at the Summer Games that year in Beijing collapsed after the South rejected the North’s condition of equal numbers of athletes.
This year’s deal came after Mr. Moon, a political liberal who has expressed eagerness to restore inter-Korean exchanges, took office last May. The North also showed flexibility in agreeing to a joint squad in women’s hockey, one of the few winter team sports in which it competes.
The joint team was created by adding 12 North Koreans to the existing South Korean national team of 23 players. The head coach is a Canadian appointed by South Korea, who must select at least three North Koreans to play in each game.
South Korean officials say they did not promise aid for the deal. But they did make one important concession: postponing joint military exercises with the United States.
“Sports exchanges can prosper only when political issues are resolved,” said Chang Ung, a North Korean member of the I.O.C., after landing in Seoul this week. “That is an unbreakable rule on the divided Korean Peninsula.”
