The secret of the blue and red phones on the inter-Korean border
For the past two years, every Monday through Friday, a South Korean official has picked up a blue phone and called North Korea, even though no one answers.
According to BBC, this blue phone and another red one were placed on the North-South Direct Telephone table, inside a building called the "Freedom House" of South Korea in the truce village of Panmunjom. This table was built in 1971, allowing communication between the Red Cross of the two Koreas.
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| A South Korean official uses a blue phone to call his North Korean counterpart. Photo: Reuters |
Across the border, a similar desk is located at North Korea's Panmungak office. The two buildings are less than 100 meters apart in the inter-Korean demilitarized zone.
More communication lines were established in 1972 as well as in the 1990s and 2000s. Today there are a total of 33 communication lines between the two Koreas, 5 for daily communication, 21 for inter-Korean dialogue, 2 for air traffic issues, 2 for maritime issues, 3 for general economic cooperation issues.
However, most of them have been idle since February 2016 when North Korea severed ties with South Korea, after Seoul suspended a joint economic project at the Kaesong industrial park in response to Pyongyang's nuclear tests.
A former South Korean communications official told Yonhap news agency how the phones worked in the early 1990s.
“All the calls are official. We don’t exchange any pleasantries,” said Kim Yeon-cheol, describing calls that usually take place between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., before the end of work.
During the two years of the North-South Korean blackout, South Korea used a blue phone to call its neighbor twice a day. The red phone was for calls from North Korea. "Theoretically, the lines were still working, but North Korea didn't pick up," a spokesman for the South's Unification Ministry said.
“Before February 2016, we communicated Monday to Friday,” she explained. “If we had a message, we would ask North Korea if they were happy to receive it. We would put the phone down and the message would be sent by fax or in a face-to-face meeting.”
On January 3, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un suddenly ordered the reopening of a communication channel between Pyongyang and Seoul to discuss issues related to the upcoming Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.
However, a spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry told the BBC that the 20-minute call at 3:30pm on 3 January was mainly to test the line and it was too early to say how communication between the two Koreas would progress.
