The two Koreas have agreed to hold reunions of families separated by the Korean War on Mount Geumgang in August. 

Delegates from South and North Korea reached the agreement during Red Cross talks that began at 10 a.m. at a hotel on the North’s resort mountain on Friday. 

Under the agreement, the family reunions, the first of their kind in three years, will be held at the scenic North Korean mountain resort between August 20th and August 26th. One hundred people from each Korea will be selected to attend the reunions and the two Koreas will exchange the final lists of the participants on August fourth.

The South will begin sending working-level officials to the site next week to check the related facilities. A South Korean advance delegation will also be dispatched to Mount Geumgang five days before the family reunions begin to help complete the preparation efforts. 

The two Koreas also agreed to continue discussions on reunion-related preparations through document exchanges and hold more Red Cross and working-level talks for further consultations on family reunions and other humanitarian issues. 

The resumption of the family reunions is among the agreements in the Panmunjeom Declaration reached at the inter-Korean summit in April. The agreement stated that the reunions would be held around August 15th, which marks Korea’s liberation from Japan’s colonial occupation. 

The most recent reunions were held in October 2015, when hundreds of family members gathered at Mount Geumgang to meet their loved ones from the other side of the border for the first time since the Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953. 

The Red Cross talks were led by Korean Red Cross President Park Kyung-seo from the South, and Pak Yong-il, the vice chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, from the North. 

South Korea had suspended tours to Mount Geumgang after a South Korean tourist was shot dead in July 2008 at the mountain resort. In protest, the North announced its confiscation and freezing of South Korean assets at the resort in 2010.

[Photo : KBS News]