North and South Koreans in Winter Games march

By Karolos Grohmann

TURIN (Reuters) – North and South Korea will march together
for the first time during a Winter Olympics opening ceremony on
Friday, organizers said.

Still technically at war, the two Koreas will enter Turin’s
Olympic stadium as one team in a move to warm ties further
between Seoul and Pyongyang.

“They will march together. They will enter the stadium as
one team,” a Turin Games spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday.

They will compete as two separate teams in the Games
itself, however.

Athletes from the two neighbors have marched before under
one flag — showing a united Korean peninsula in blue against a
white background — at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and in Athens
four years later.

They then competed for their separate countries.

Greece, cradle of the ancient and the modern Games,
traditionally enters the stadium first. The two Koreas will
enter earlier than in Sydney or Athens because they are spelled
with a C in Italian, the spokesman said.

North Korea did not participate at the previous Winter
Games in Salt Lake City four years ago.

While political and social ties have considerably improved
in the past few years, military tensions remain on the Korean
peninsula.

North and South Korea competed as a single team in an
experiment in soccer and table tennis in the early 1990s and
have hinted they may consider a joint team for the 2008 summer
Games in Beijing.

The two nations have been divided since the 1950-53 Korean
war that ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty.

A demilitarized zone dating back to that war still
separates communist North Korea with its capitalist southern
neighbor.