South Korea's unification ministry on Thursday unveiled newly declassified documents offering a glimpse into what led to the July 4 joint communique in 1972, the first agreement signed between South and North Korea since the division of the peninsula.
The dossier includes transcripts of confidential inter-Korean contacts in the months leading up to the historic agreement, such as a 1972 meeting in Pyongyang between Seoul's then spy chief Lee Hu-rak and the North's Kim Yong-ju, the younger brother of then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung.
It highlights the July 4 joint communique, in which South and North Korea agreed on establishing an official hotline, which had been secretly launched in April the same year.
It was also through this joint communique they agreed on the principles of achieving unification without the intervention of external forces and seeking a peaceful process that eliminates the use of force.
The dossier consists of 1,678 pages of documents from November 1971 to February 1979 declassified under the unification ministry's regulation on disclosing documents dating back more than 30 years on past inter-Korean talks.
While details of the confidential meetings in the 1970s had been partially disclosed in memoirs authored by key officials, the ministry explained that it marks the first time the government has made public the transcripts as an official record.
Some 230 pages of the dossier, however, have been blacked out for privacy and security reasons, according to the ministry.
Details of a historic meeting between Lee and leader Kim were also not included following a review by a deliberative committee. The committee is set to review whether to disclose the document on their talks three years later.
Since first disclosing the declassified documents in May last year, the unification ministry has revealed the documents on three occasions, including the latest one.
A ministry official told reporters that the ministry plans to disclose additional declassified documents twice next year as part of efforts to enhance transparency in inter-Korean policy and provide information to the public.
The 30-year-old documents are available at the Office of the Inter-Korean Dialogue and the ministry's major research center.
Source: Yonhap News Agency