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North and South Korean Teams to March as One at Olympics

North and South Korean athletes marched together during the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.Credit...Amy Sancetta/Associated Press

HONG KONG — North and South Korea agreed on Wednesday to march their athletes together under one flag at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics next month and to field a joint women’s ice hockey team. It was the most dramatic gesture of reconciliation between them in a decade.

South Korea, host of the games, has said it hopes such a partnership in sports could contribute to a political thaw after years of high tensions. It came even as the prospect of war over the North’s nuclear and missile tests has grown especially acute.

The Games will begin on Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and the women’s ice-hockey squad will be the first combined Korean team for the Olympics, and the first unified team since their athletes played together for an international table-tennis championship and a youth soccer tournament in 1991.

The two countries’ delegations will march at the opening ceremony behind a “unified Korea” flag that shows an undivided Korean Peninsula, negotiators from both sides said in a joint news release after talks at the border village of Panmunjom. The North will send 230 supporters to the Games, and negotiators agreed that supporters of both Koreas would root together for athletes from both countries.

The prospect of North and South Koreans cheering together offers a stunning contrast to the bombastic rhetoric of possible war from North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un and President Trump of the United States, South Korea’s main ally.

Mr. Trump has threatened the North with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” should it put the security of Americans and their allies at risk. Mr. Kim has called Mr. Trump a lunatic.

The Olympics agreement could help President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who has been pushing for dialogue and reconciliation with the North.

Few expect that the breakthrough will lead to a quick breakthrough in the decades-old standoff over the North’s nuclear weapons program. But it provided a welcome reprieve for South Koreans who have grown both alarmed and weary over the tensions and talks of possible war in the peninsula.

The news was welcomed by top officials at the United Nations, where Secretary General António Guterres has said he plans to attend the opening ceremonies. The president of the General Assembly, Miroslav Lajcak of Slovakia, said on Twitter: “Heartened by reports that Koreans from DPRK & RoK will march together in @Olympics opening ceremony.”

The two countries also agreed on Wednesday that their skiing teams would train together in the Masikryong ski resort in North Korea. The resort, a showpiece project of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was opened in 2013.

South Korean officials said on Wednesday that the North’s delegation would include at least 550 people, including about 150 to the Paralympic Games in March. But the joint news statement said that the final number would be determined in Switzerland on Saturday, when the International Olympic Committee is to bring together North and South Korean officials. The plan is for the North’s athletes to enter the South over a land border on Feb. 1.

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Can the Olympics Bring the Koreas Together?

North Korea has agreed to send athletes to the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, but the Olympics have long been a window into geopolitics between the two sides.

Escalating brinkmanship, crippling sanctions, intercontinental missile testing — can the hair-trigger standoff between North and South Korea be defused by figure skating? The 2018 Winter Games will be hosted by North Korea’s mortal enemy about 40 miles from their border, in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Whether the regime ends up as a participant or a pariah, it will not be the first time the Olympics has been at the center of a geopolitical chess game. Despite a tiny economy and decades of international isolation, North Korea has produced an impressive slate of world-class athletes, and won dozens of Olympic medals, from judo to gymnastics, table tennis to wrestling. In the early 2000s, the two Koreas, still formally at war, actually marched together in the Olympic ceremonies. This year, even with the global crackdown on the regime, South Korea’s president and the International Olympic Committee have been repeatedly urging North Korea to attend the so-called games of peace. To fully understand the global push to get North Korea to compete, you need to rewind to the 1988 Olympics. Seoul was selected as the host city. To North Korea, it was not just a snub, but an affront to their national dignity. They demanded, with apparent support from China and the Soviet Union, that the International Olympic Committee allow the North to co-host and move some events across the border. There were two years of secret negotiations and threats. Ten months before the 1988 games, two agents of the regime placed a bomb on Korean Air Flight 858, killing more than 100 people. The bombers later said that the goal was to sabotage the Olympics by scaring off attendees. But the games went on as planned and were hailed as a historic success for the South. Meanwhile, North Korea, which carried out a feeble boycott after being abandoned by the Soviets and Chinese, was named a state sponsor of terror by the United States. What followed was years of international isolation, crippling hardship and famine, and aggressive nuclear ambitions. There have been periods of calm. The North occasionally sent teams to international competitions in the South. In 1991, the two Koreas actually united to play as a single team in youth soccer and table top tennis tournaments. But North Korea notoriously lashed out again when the South was hosting the World Cup in 2002. During the final set of matches, two boats from the North opened fire on a South Korean patrol ship, triggering a gun battle that killed and injured dozens of sailors on both sides. It was the last major international sports competition held in South Korea. Today, the threat posed by North Korea has been intensifying. But diplomacy has found a place on the playing field. There were the North and South gymnasts in Rio, the cross-border women’s hockey and soccer matches last spring, the tae kwon do exchange in June. And then there was a pair of figure skaters from North Korea, who, in September, won worldwide fans and qualified to compete in the Olympics, skating to a Beatles song. But it remains to be seen whether the games can offer a diplomatic off-ramp for the Korean standoff or even a brief reprieve for a whirl around the rink.

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North Korea has agreed to send athletes to the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, but the Olympics have long been a window into geopolitics between the two sides.

So far, the only North Korean athletes to qualify for the Pyeongchang Games are a pairs figure skating team. North Korea missed an Oct. 31 deadline to accept invitations from South Korea and the International Olympic Committee to join the Games. But the international body has said it remains willing to consider wild-card entries for North Korean athletes.

A unified team of any kind at the Olympics would be a milestone for the Koreas, which have been bitter rivals in international sports as well as diplomacy and armed conflict, but which also have a history of trying to use sports as an avenue for reconciliation.

Mr. Moon proposed in June that the two Koreas form a unified team for the Pyeongchang Games, but the suggestion was not taken seriously until the Mr. Kim used his New Year’s Day speech to propose dialogue with the South and to discuss his country’s participation in the Olympics.

That proposal led to a series of talks in Panmunjom between the two Korean governments. In an earlier round of negotiations, the North agreed to send a 140-member orchestra to play in the South during the Olympics.

The prospect of fostering inter-Korean reconciliation through sports and other channels has strong appeal in South Korea, so much so that successive governments have tried to negotiate sending a unified team to the Olympics.

Such efforts have sometimes led to breakthroughs. In 2000, the year of the first inter-Korean summit meeting, the countries’ delegations marched together at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. They have marched together nine times, including in Athens in 2004, carrying a blue-and-white flag representing a united Korea, and at the 2006 Winter Olympics. The two Koreas last marched together in the Asian Winter Games of 2007.

But forming a joint Olympic team proved elusive. Past negotiations faltered over such details as whether a joint team would have an equal number of players from each country, who would choose the coaches and where the athletes would train.

South Korean athletes, who have far more resources and Olympic experience than their counterparts from the North, have balked in the past at the idea of sacrificing their hard-earned prospects for the sake of parity with North Korea in a united team. South Korean news outlets have reported that the South asked the International Olympic Committee to allow a unified hockey team to have an expanded roster, so that none of the South Korean players would have to bow out of the Games.

South Korea first sought to use sports to ease military tensions with the North back in the 1960s, proposing joint teams for international athletic events. But sports diplomacy has never led to a lasting political thaw on the Korean Peninsula, which has remained technically in a state of war since the 1950-53 Korean War was halted with a truce.

The two Koreas negotiated sharing some of the 1988 Seoul Olympics after South Korea won the right to play host to the Games. But the talks collapsed and the North bombed a South Korean passenger jet in 1987 in an attempt to disrupt the games in the South.

Inter-Korean sports and other exchanges increased between 1998 and 2008, when the leaders of the South were pushing their so-called Sunshine Policy of seeking reconciliation and easing political tensions.

But that period of détente, which gained momentum with the historic inter-Korean summit in 2000, unraveled as conservatives took power in the South in 2008. They withdrew from projects like a joint factory park in the North Korean town of Kaesong in response to the North’s nuclear weapons pursuit and other acts the South considered provocative.

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

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