- Seoul and Pyongyang have held 21 rounds of family reunions since 2000

ISTANBUL 

South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung Friday called on Pyongyang to resume contacts between divided Korean families, separated since the war in 1950s.

"It is the responsibility of the political circles in both South and North to let the separated families confirm whether their relatives are alive and, at the very least, exchange letters," Lee said as Koreans mark first day of Chuseok holidays.

Lee made the comments at Ganghwa Peace Observatory in Incheon, west of capital Seoul, overlooking North Korea during a meeting with elderly people who fled to South Korea from North Korea during the 1950-53 Korean War, according to Yonhap news.

The latest call is one of many attempts by Lee, since his election in June this year, to restore ties between South and North Koreas, which have nosedived in last three years under Yoon Suk Yeol administration.

“I'd like to tell the North that I would like them to consider on humanitarian grounds," Lee said, referring to reunion of divided families.

"Even if we are in confrontation and conflict and competing militarily and politically, (these measures are needed) from a humanitarian standpoint."

Seoul and Pyongyang, technically at war as the 1950 conflict ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty, have held 21 rounds of reunions since 2000 when their leaders held a landmark summit.

More than 20,000 family members, who had not seen each other since the war, have met during these reunions, usually staged around Chuseok, a major holiday celebrated across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), as well as on important national holidays.

Last such reunion was held in 2018 during the presidency of Moon Jae-in, the former president from Lee’s Democratic Party.

Common people living on two sides of the DMZ have no direct communication, no exchange of mail, phone or other means of communication.

“I feel a sense of guilt that this is all due to the shortcomings of politicians like myself," Lee said about the communications blackout between the divided families.