North Korea cancels talks with South in delegate row The venue for the cancelled talks at Grand Hilton Hotel in Seoul. The first high-level talks in six years between North and South Korea have been scrapped because of a stalemate over who will lead each delegation, Seoul said on Tuesday, a day before the talks were to begin. North Korea would not be sending its officials to Seoul for the two-day meeting that was to begin on Wednesday because the South had changed the head of its delegation, said a spokesman for Seoul's unification ministry, Kim Hyung-suk. South Korea had wanted a ministerial meeting between each country's inter-Korean affairs agency, but Pyongyang would not commit to that. When Seoul told Pyongyang on Tuesday it was sending a lower-level official than it had initially proposed in preparatory talks, North Korea said it would consider that a provocation, Kim said. Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea scholar at Seoul's Dongguk University, said the cancellation arose partly from misunderstandings between the two sides about who was equivalent to whom in power between their largely different political systems. The two sides are offended by each other now. The relations may again undergo a cooling-off period before negotiations for further talks resume," he said. North Korea did not immediately issue its own statement about the cancelled talks. The meeting was set up during a 17-hour negotiating session on Sunday, but the rivals set aside the question of who would lead each delegation. Kim said that on Tuesday the North offered to send a senior official of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea as chief delegate, and Seoul said it would send its vice-minister for unification. South Korea had previously proposed sending its unification minister. After it announced that the vice-minister would go instead, North Korea said it would not send anyone and "all responsibility is entirely on South Korea," Kim said. He added that Seoul was open to talks if North Korea reconsidered. The main goal of the talks had been to see whether the Koreas could revive two high-profile economic co-operation projects that were born in the so-called sunshine era, a 10-year period ending in 2008 when South Korea was ruled by liberal presidents who shipped large quantities of aid to Pyongyang as they sought to improve ties. The last of those projects, a North Korean factory complex run with North Korean workers and South Korean managers and capital, shut this spring. North Korea also wanted Seoul to restart an era of rapprochement by commemorating past joint statements on reunification and joint economic co-operation efforts. But Seoul balked at this; it has demanded apologies for past bloodshed before allowing such exchanges. North Korea's interest in talks followed its longstanding cycle of alternating between provocative behaviour and attempts to seek dialogue in what analysts say are efforts to win outside concessions. After UN sanctions were strengthened after North Korea's third nuclear test in February, Pyongyang, which is estimated to have a handful of crude nuclear devices, threatened nuclear war and missile strikes against Seoul and Washington. North Korea has also conducted recent nuclear tests and long-range rocket launches. Some observers believe Pyongyang was trying to ease ties with Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing as a way to win coveted talks with Washington, which it believes could grant it aid and security guarantees. South Korea's president, Park Geun-hye, has made trust-building with Pyongyang a hallmark of her nascent rule, even as she vows strong counter-strikes to any North Korean attacks. There was scepticism in Seoul about the talks even before they collapsed. "We cannot be overly hopeful about inter-Korean relations, which reached a new low not long ago," the conservative Korea JoongAng Daily said in an editorial. We have experienced numerous setbacks during past talks with Pyongyang.