SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A North Korean women’s soccer team arrived in South Korea on Sunday to compete in a regional tournament, the first visit by North Korean athletes in eight years amid political tensions between the two nations.A total of 39 players and staff with North Korea’s Naegohyang Women’s FC arrived at Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul, aboard a plane from China. They didn’t make any comments, though some activists shouted “Welcome! Welcome!” and citizens used their mobile phones to film their arrival. The North Korean team will face South Korea’s Suwon FC Women on Wednesday in the semifinals of the Asian Football Confederation Women’s Champions League in Suwon, a city south of Seoul.The two Koreas have occasionally used sports events to create feel-good moments when relations were amicable. But the latest soccer event won’t likely signal any thaw in their long-strained ties, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un maintaining his confrontational stance against South Korea.
“We should be cautious about interpreting their visit to South Korea as a sign of an improvement in South-North relations,” Lee Wootae, a senior research fellow at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification, said in a recent report. “It would be more accurate to view this as a limited South-North Korean contact within the framework of international sports.”
