‘’We will have a truce resolution at the UN, we are hoping it will be unanimous, which means the UN is is fully supporting a peaceful Olympic Games,’’ said Pyeongchang 2018 Organising Committee (POCOG) chief Lee Hee-beom.

The call comes in the week when many have been remembering the armistice which brought the First World War to an end in 1918.

As the Olympic flame began its journey towards Pyeongchang, there was a release of doves, symbolic of a desire for peace, in both Ancient Olympia and Athens. 

On Korean soil, Olympic organisers declared peace to be one of the five pillars of their domestic Torch Relay.

The call for truce has an added urgency because of the aggressive noises coming from North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and the Donald Trump administration in the White House. Some have even dubbed the 2018 Games "the most dangerous’’ Olympics.

There were no North Korean competitors in 1988 when the Games were held in Seoul after diplomatic negotiations proved fruitless. Four years ago in Sochi, there were no competitors from the North because they failed to qualify. This time, two figure skaters have made the cut and others may yet achieve the qualifying marks before the Games.

‘’The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is inviting North Korea and we also expect that North Korea will participate. We will welcome them. We will have all preparations for their safe stay during the Olympic Games. During the test events last April, North Korea’s ladies' ice hockey team was in Pyeongchang, and during their stay in South Korea there were no incidents,’’said POCOG President Lee.

"The Korean Government is doing its best in cooperation with neighbouring countries to have a very safe Olympic Games. In the 2018 Games, we want to unite all Korean people and also we want to unite the neighbouring countries.’’

The question of the two Koreas has been a thorn in the side of the Olympic Movement for much of the past sixty years. There was briefly a coming together in the early years of the new millennium, when, at the urging of IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, the two teams marched together from Sydney 2000 to the Torino 2006 Winter Games. Even this was largely symbolic because the teams competed and were quartered as separate entities.

The Olympic Movement has long cherished the idea of an Olympic Truce.

‘’I would heartily welcome the idea of the belligerents in time of war, interrupting their fight for a time in order to celebrate the Games and display the strength of their muscles in a loyal and chivalrous manner,’’ said Baron Pierre de Coubertin in the thirties, a decade when war clouds were gathering in Europe and Asia.

The Korean war was still raging in 1952 at the time of the Helsinki Games. Erik von Frenkell, President of the Helsinki Olympic Organising Committee offered a prayer for peace.

‘’With unassuming voice, we have requested a truce throughout the world for the duration of the Games. We hope and go on hoping that the Olympic Games will provide a respite from international tension and that international understanding will increase.’’

At those Games, a woman clad in white eluded the security cordon and ran towards the dais to try and make a speech. Her name was Barbara Rotraut Pleyer and she was dubbed the ‘’Peace Angel’’.

Half a century later, Yoko Ono and Peter Gabriel were at least on the official programme at Torino 2006 for their performances promoting peace.

Although many called for a formal truce to be requested, it was not until much later that this was officially made at the UN, though in 1980, then IOC President Lord Killanin closed the Lake Placid Winter Olympics with the words: ‘’If we can all come together, it will be for a better world and will avoid the holocaust which may well be upon us if we are not careful.’’ He gave a similar grim warning later that year in Moscow.

In 1984, the Winter Games were held in Sarajevo, a Bosnian town in what was then Yugoslavia.

‘’I am convinced these Games will remain forever in our hearts and memories,’’ said Juan Antonio Samaranch, presiding over his first Games.

He never lost his affection for what he described as ‘’Drag (dear)Sarajevo’’. In 1992,shortly before the Olympic Games opened in his own home city of Barcelona, he read from a letter by the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, calling for a truce in the former Yugoslavia which had been plunged into a bitter civil war.

‘’This would be a truce in the classical tradition and perhaps the beginning of a common bond and an increase in civic behaviour,’’ said Samaranch.

The following year, the UN General Assembly agreed to support a resolution which ‘’revived the ancient Greek tradition of Ekecheiria or Olympic Truce calling for all hostilities to cease during the Games, thereby mobilising the youth of the world in the cause of peace’’.

They also declared 1994 the ‘’International year of Sport and the Olympic Ideal’’.

Samaranch called this an ‘’historic event for the Olympic Movement and an honour on the occasion of our centenary’’.

The Winter Games were held in Lillehammer that year but Samaranch’s anguish was clear when Sarajevo was still in conflict as the 1994 Games opened. Calls for peace made by Samaranch and Organising Committee Chief Gerhard Heiberg fell on deaf ears among the combatants.

The request for a UN truce resolution became a regular event after the UN decided ‘’to biennalise this item so as to be considered in advance of every Summer and Winter Olympic Games’’.

In November 1997, Japan’s synchronised swimming bronze medallist Mikako Kotani, a member of the IOC Athletes' Commission delivered the plea for peace. There was also an undertaking to fly the UN flag at Olympic sites in Nagano the following year.

An International Olympic Truce Foundation was set up in 2000 and now has headquarters in Athens. Other initiatives such as Peace and Sport and Generations for Peace have similar goals.

In 2009, IOC were eventually granted "Observer" status at the UN. It was ‘’a huge recognition of the role sport can play in contributing to a better and peaceful world,’’ said the then IOC President Jacques Rogge.

The closeness between the two organisations was emphasised in 2014 whern Korean Ban Ki-moon was UN Secretary General. He carried the flame alongside IOC President Thomas Bach. Ban also appeared in a video message at the opening ceremony of the Winter Games in Sochi and addressed the IOC Session.

‘’The United Nations and the IOC are joining forces for our shared ideals.’’

He called again for warring parties ‘’to lay down their weapons during the Games and lift their sights to the promise of peace’’.

Yet a few days after the Sochi flame died, Russian armed forces moved into areas of the Ukraine.

British Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations Philip Noel-Baker once addressed the IOC on the matter of peace. He had been an Olympic 1500 metres silver medallist in 1920 and was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

‘’I hope that these Games will turn the mind of mankind from conflict to cooperation,’’ he said 70 years ago and the words might just as easily have been said this week. It underlines just how much remains to be done, though truce supporters accept ‘’Sport will not impose peace. But it might inspire it.’’