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First session in Seoul of the North-South Red Cross talks; South Korean delegation on right

The rationale for Pak's assumption of autocratic powers in 1972 was the newly-opened dialog with P'yongyang. Whereas alarm at student demands for direct talks with North Korea had provided the immediate occasion for the coup in 1961, a decade later Pak had come to feel that the changed international situation required Seoul to take some initiative on the basic issue of Korean reunification. His first feeler was the August 1971 proposal for talks between the South and North Korean Red Cross societies, which led to secret high-level political talks that were not made public until 4 July 1972. These talks continue with considerable caution and hesitation by both sides, but are kept alive by mutual self-interest and world trends, as well as by the fundamental longing of all Koreans for their historic unity.

National unity remains the ultimate goal. As a natural geographic and economic entity which ages ago produced a unique ethnic homogeneity, Korea was the least divisible of the postwar divided countries. The Korean people are ever-mindful of their 1,000-year-old history as a unified nation, contrasting, for example, with the long separatist history of the Germanies. Today, though they have been separated for a 20