North Korean athletes have begun arriving here to attend the Incheon Asian Games opening later this week. The first batch of the 352-strong contingent arrived in Incheon aboard an Air Koryo flight from Pyongyang last Thursday.

There will be five more such groups of North Korean athletes, trainers and officials coming to Incheon in time for the biggest sports festival in Asia scheduled for Sept. 19-Oct. 4.

It is the third time that North Korea has participated in an international multisport event held in South Korea, after the 2002 Busan Asian Games and the 2003 Daegu Universiade Games.

Most recently, a North Korean women’s football team participated in the East Asian Cup held in Seoul in July last year. Two months later, a South Korean team visited Pyongyang to participate in the Asian Cup Weightlifting Championships.

It is good for countries like South and North Korea, whose relations are usually tense, to engage in sports exchanges and other people-to-people contact.

So every time North Korea sends athletes to South Korea or agrees to form a unified team for international competitions being held in a third country, there is talk of hope for a possible boost to ties between the two sides.

This time, likewise, some South Koreans are urging the Seoul government to use the North’s participation in the Incheon Asian Games as an opportunity to improve relations between the two sides.

Their argument has some ground in that relations between Seoul and Pyongyang have been at rock bottom since the Lee Myung-bak administration. Nevertheless, history tells us that we need not have overly high expectations.

The North’s participation in the 2002 Busan Asian Games and the 2003 Daegu Universiade and dispatch of cheerleading squads of vibrant young women to the two events and the 2005 East Asia Athletics Championships in Incheon did raise South Koreans’ interest in North Korea.

But all they turned out to be no more than one-off events. They did not provide any substantial momentum for the two sides to find a breakthrough in their strained relations. Perhaps one of the most memorable things is that Ri Sol-ju, now the wife of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was one of the cheerleaders who sang, shouted and waved the North Korean flag during the 2005 athletics championships.

If the North wants to present to the South and the world its participation in the Asian Games as a genuine gesture for peace and reconciliation on the peninsula, what it should do first is to stop provocative actions like firing artillery shells, rockets and missiles and accept Seoul’s proposal to hold high-level talks and arrange a new round of reunions of separated families.

In the South, people should not put too much political significance on the North’s participation in the Asian Games. Doing so would only exacerbate the internal dispute over how to deal with North Korea, as in the case of the controversies about displaying North Korean flags in places other than official Asian Games sites.