INCHEON (Yonhap News) ― Asia’s Olympic leader said Sunday he held talks with North Korean officials to discuss their possible participation in next year’s Asian Games to be held in South Korea.

Still, Olympic Council of Asia president Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah sounded a cautious note on whether North Korea will send its sports delegation to Incheon, a port city west of Seoul, in 2014.

“For next year, I can say that there is very positive dialogue,” said Sheikh Ahmad, of Kuwait, in a news conference in Incheon. “I am in the position I can make a good coordinator between the two sides. But I cannot announce what we are reaching now. It will take time.”

His comments came two months after South Korea invited North Korea to participate in the 2014 Incheon Asian Games via the Olympic Council of Asia. North Korea has yet to make any response regarding the South Korean offer.

Inter-Korean relations remain soured after an agreement to hold their first high-level talks in six years unraveled earlier this month due to a dispute over the ranks of chief delegates that were to attend the meeting.

Sheik Ahmad is in Incheon to attend the ongoing Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, to which North Korea did not send its athletes.

“I hope next year we will have 45 flags on the opening ceremony by the athletes,” Sheikh Ahmad said, noting that North Korea trusts him and is discussing the Incheon Asian Games with him.

The Olympic Council of Asia is a sporting body, which controls all the sports in Asia and it has 45 member states, including North Korea.

North Korea sent 184 athletes and a squad of more than 100 female cheerleaders to Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city, for the 2002 Busan Games.

It marked the first time that the North took part in an international competition held in the South since the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

In 2003, North Korea dispatched 197 athletes and a squad of more than 300 all-female cheerleaders to South Korea’s southeastern city of Daegu to attend Universiade, the world university games.