South Korea rail plan shows limits of North Korea outreach

South Korea's plan to revive a border rail link near the demilitarised zone has become a symbol of President Lee Jae Myung's attempt to reopen ties with North Korea, even as Pyongyang rejects Seoul's overtures and Washington pursues its own talks.

The abandoned Woljeong-ri station in Cheorwon, near the heavily fortified frontier dividing the Korean peninsula, is South Korea's northernmost station. Seoul eventually wants projects such as Woljeong-ri to help restore rail links with the North.

The station once sat on a line connecting Seoul to Wonsan, now in North Korea, but it was destroyed during the 1950-53 Korean War. It was rebuilt at its current site in 1988 and is now an attraction for visitors near the DMZ.

Work to restore the line began in 2015 but stopped a year later after North Korea's fourth nuclear test. The latest push comes during a difficult moment for Seoul's diplomacy.

US President Donald Trump scaled back annual military drills with South Korea this week, calling them “inappropriate and hostile” towards North Korea, and said he would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year. North Korea then fired around 10 short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, while Kim's sister Kim Yo Jong mocked Seoul's relationship with Washington as “master-servant”.

Lee has said he is ready for talks with Pyongyang without preconditions, including on formally ending the Korean War, which ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. His unification minister said in July that Seoul had shifted from prioritising denuclearisation to curbing the expansion of North Korea's nuclear programme.

Pyongyang has repeatedly described itself as an “irreversible” nuclear state and labelled Seoul its “most hostile” enemy.

Some people near the project are sceptical. Cheorwon resident Moon Jae-yong said the rail project did not seem practical from a local point of view.

Vladimir Tikhonov, a Korean Studies professor at the University of Oslo, told AFP that South Korea was worried about being sidelined as China, Russia and the United States engage with Pyongyang in different ways. Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University, said preparing infrastructure in the South could save time if inter-Korean links are eventually restored, but called that “virtually impossible” under current circumstances.