North Korea proposes family reunions with South The North said the reunion programme would provide fresh momentum to improving ties following years of high tensions. The South's unification ministry, in charge of inter-Korean affairs, said it would send its own proposal later for the date and other details on family reunions. In early January South Korean President Park Geun-Hye had called for a family reunion event to be held around the time of the Lunar New Year. But the North rejected the offer, citing planned South-US military exercises as a major barrier. Millions of Koreans were left separated by the Korean War, which sealed the peninsula's division. Most have died without having the chance to reunite with family members last seen six decades ago. The reunion programme began in earnest in 2000 following a historic inter-Korean summit. There are normally no opportunities for meetings or any other kind of contact between ordinary Korean families separated by the border. Sporadic events since then have seen around 17,000 people briefly reunited. The last such meeting took place in late 2010, before the programme was suspended in the wake of the North's shelling of the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong. About 72,000 South Koreans - nearly half of them aged over 80 - are still alive and wait-listed for a chance to join the highly competitive reunion events, which select only up to a few hundred participants each time. The North's offer for a family reunion event was "prompted by the single desire to open a way of improving the relations between the North and the South in practice as desired and wished by all Koreans at home and abroad," KCNA said. The event may take place at the North's Mount Kumgang resort, it said. Pyongyang has sought to link the family reunions to a resumption of South Korean tours to the resort - a source of much needed hard currency. The South suspended the tours in 2008 after a North Korean soldier shot dead a female tourist who strayed into a restricted zone. Seoul insists their resumption should not be discussed alongside the family reunions.