South Korean soldiers march in the 75th Armed Forces Day parade in Seoul, South Korea, Sept. 26, 2023. (David Choi/Stars and Stripes)
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean military leaders this week proposed to suspend the inter-Korean military agreement designed to lower tensions on the peninsula, citing ongoing provocations by the North and a weakening of security at the border between the two countries.
The 5-year-old North-South military agreement was a “disguised peace offensive” that compromised the country’s security, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, army Gen. Kim Seung Kyum, told lawmakers Thursday in Seoul.
The “military agreement has affected our surveillance and reconnaissance, training and current operational readiness,” he said during a televised hearing.
North Korea has violated the agreement 17 times since its inception in 2018, including in December, when the communist regime flew at least five drones into the South’s airspace for the first time since 2017, according to Kim.
South Korea’s military responded to the incursion by flying three reconnaissance drones north of the border to surveil the North’s buildings, the Ministry of National Defense said at the time.
Defense Minister Shin Won-sik told reporters Tuesday he would seek to suspend the military agreement that “limits real-time monitoring of signs of North Korea’s provocations on the front-lines,” the Donga-Ilbo newspaper reported that day.
The agreement between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in was signed during their summit in Pyongyang on Sept. 19, 2018, when the leaders appeared to make headway in thawing the stalemate of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Under the deal, Kim and Moon agreed on a host of deconfliction measures “based on the common understanding that easing military tension and building confidence on the Korean Peninsula is integral to securing lasting and stable peace.”
Those measures include establishing a no-fly zone for all types of aircraft above the Military Demarcation Line separating the two Koreas; depending on the type of aircraft, this no-fly zone extends up to 25 miles from the peninsula’s east and western borders.
Shin reportedly told reporters the no-fly zone clause in the agreement “greatly limits” South Korea’s optics of imminent threats from North Korea.
The defense minister also compared North Korean forces to Hamas militants who launched an attack against Israel on Oct. 7. Shin said the military threat from North Korean troops would be greater than Hamas and that Israel may have benefited from non-stop surveillance using drones and other aircraft.
The agreement also requires the two sides to withdraw from guard posts within 1,093 yards from the Demilitarized Zone.
Relations between Seoul and Pyongyang have since frayed. North Korea has fired 21 ballistic missiles in 14 separate days of testing so far this year and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has vowed to respond to the regime’s actions with military drills and regular deployments of strategic U.S. assets to the country, such as the USS Kentucky’s port call to Busan in July.
The notion of suspending the agreement “is unfortunate but also not surprising given the state of inter-Korean relations these days,” said Jenny Town, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and director of 38 North, a Washington, D.C.-based North Korea monitoring group.
“The kind of optimism, goodwill and cooperation that existed when the agreement was negotiated is gone and both sides have violated the agreement multiple times,” she told Stars and Stripes in an email Friday.
Maintaining the agreement despite the current state of relations “would reflect some notion of getting back to negotiations in the near or midterm future,” Town added.
