Can women's football help reconnect North and South Korea?

North Korea’s Naegohyang Women’s FC will play a South Korean women’s team in Suwon on May 20, marking the first permitted travel to the South in more than seven years. The move comes as North Korea rewrote its constitution to define South Korea as its primary foe and remove reunification language. The team trained in Beijing, arrived at Incheon, and then traveled to Suwon ahead of the Asian Football Confederation Women’s Champions League semi-final. Sports diplomacy is presented as a tool to ease strained ties by separating cultural exchange from politics. Analysts view the match as positive but limited, unlikely to produce an immediate breakthrough while still carrying some diplomatic meaning.

"North Korea's Naegohyang Women's FC is due to play a South Korean women's team in Suwon on May 20 the first time Pyongyang has permitted its athletes to travel to the South in more than seven years. For some, it is an indication that the North is deploying "sports diplomacy" to ease strained bilateral ties. The rare visit comes as North Korea has framed the South as its "primary foe and invariable principal enemy" in a recently rewritten constitution that removes notions of reunifying the peninsula, which has been divided since the 1950-1953 Korean War."

"Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, argued in an article published on the CSIS website on May 4 that, "sports diplomacy has always been an important tool of inter-Korean diplomacy." Pyongyang allowing the athletes to travel to the South "is significant, given North Korea's shutdown of all dialogue with South Korea and its assertion of the enemy-state declaration vis-a-vis Seoul," Cha said. "In this regard, the football match could demonstrate the potential to separate cultural exchanges from politics," he added."

"The 27-strong North Korean team had been training in Beijing but arrived at Incheon airport on Sunday before travelling on to Suwon, some 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) south of Seoul, ahead of the semi-final of the Asian Football Confederation's Women's Champions League. Signs of improving North-South ties? While analysts broadly agree that a North Korean team visiting the South is a positive development, they caution against reading too much into Pyongyang's decision."

""The likelihood of this football match becoming an immediate 'breakthrough' in inter-Korean relations is limited," said Hyobin Lee, a professor at Sogang University in Seoul. "But I also do not think it is meaningless, and I partially agree with Victor Cha's analysis," she told DW."

Read at www.dw.com