Seoul  - South Korea's Unification Minister Hyun In Taek has downplayed North Korea's latest conciliatory gestures as "tactical," a news report said Wednesday.

"There have been some changes in North Korea's hard-line policy towards South Korea since July," the minister, who is responsible for his country's policy towards North Korea, said at a seminar in Seoul on Wednesday.

He added that North Korea had not changed its position in the dispute over its nuclear weapons programme and the six-party talks involving the US, Russia, Japan, China and the two Koreas concerning it, the national news agency Yonhap quoted him as saying.

He described the latest changes as "tactical rather than fundamental."

Hyun said that the latest developments were significant but that they had only brought inter-Korean relations back to where they were before.

Relations had visibly cooled since a conservative government took office in South Korea a year and a half ago and adopted a harder line towards the communist government in Pyongyang.

Tensions in the region rose when the North tested a long-range rocket in April and carried out its second nuclear test in May.

But North Korea has recently appeared to take a more conciliatory line towards the South, agreeing to new reunions between divided families and making cross-border traffic easier. (dpa)