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According to Yonhap News,
(SEOUL = Yonhap News) Despite renewed inter-Korean tension, South Korea has started preparatory work for building a peace park inside the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), officials said Wednesday.
As part of efforts to boost inter-Korean ties, President Park Geun-hye proposed that the two Koreas build an international park inside the last-remaining Cold War frontier. For the outreach project to Pyongyang, Seoul set aside 40.2 billion won (US$38.4 million) in this year's budget.
Members of the task force team at Seoul's Ministry of Unification visited three candidate cities -- Paju in Gyeonggi Province, and Cheorwon and Goseong in Gangwon Province -- several times in February and March for field investigations.
During the visits there, they met local officials and were briefed on the overall circumstances of each region and received cadastral data to review, according to officials of relevant agencies.
The candidate towns along the border are well-known for DMZ tours.
After additional field surveys and necessary reviews, the Seoul government is scheduled to unveil its blueprint "soon," according to the officials.
"We've gotten prepared to establish the peace park, and some progress has been made," a ministry official said.
"But the government has yet to decide on when to announce the plan due mainly to sour inter-Korean relations," the official said, adding the key is "to create circumstances good enough for us to make an official proposal about the project to the North."
In her speech in the former East German city of Dresden last month, President Park once again expressed her hope to build the park inside the DMZ, saying it will "presage the replacement of tension with peace on the DMZ, division with unification and conflict in Northeast Asia with harmony."
But the North flatly rejected her package of initiatives, calling it "irrelevant and nonsensical," and has taken a series of provocative acts, including firing missiles into the sea and threatening nuclear war.
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Source: Yonhap News (April. 16, 2014)