'Rare, meaningful': North Korean football team ventures into South
North Korean fans attend the Women's Asian Cup in Australia in March (Antony DICKSON) A women's football club will on Sunday be the first sports team from North Korea to visit neighbouring South Korea in eight years. The isolated and nuclear-armed country's Naegohyang Women's FC will play the South's Suwon FC Women three days later in the Asian Champions League semi-finals. AFP looks at the trip, the politics and the logistics.
- The politics - The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. Sports cooperation helped trigger a thaw in inter-Korean ties after North Korea sent athletes, cheerleaders and a high-level delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in the South. The two Koreas also fielded their first unified Olympic team -- a joint women's ice hockey squad -- at the Pyeongchang Games.
Ri Sol Ju, the wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, also visited South Korea in 2005 as part of a North Korean cheering squad for the Asian Athletics Championships. But relations have sharply deteriorated since US-North Korea nuclear talks collapsed in 2019, with Pyongyang repeatedly declaring itself an "irreversible" nuclear state. - The logistics - The Naegohyang squad are set to arrive in South Korea by air from Beijing.
A total of 39 people will make the trip, according to South Korea's unification ministry, consisting of 27 players and 12 staff members. They will stay at a hotel in Suwon, a city about 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Seoul and where Wednesday's match will take place. South Korea's Suwon FC squad will be based at the same hotel.
The dining areas and travel routes will be kept separate, local reports said, making encounters between the two sides unlikely. The game will be at Suwon Sports Complex, which has a capacity of just under 12,000. - The law - Under South Korean national security laws it could be deemed illegal to own or brandish the North Korean flag or play its national anthem in public.
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