hankyoreh

at the Blue House

By Park Hyun and Gil Yun-hyung, Washington and Tokyo correspondents and Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

The military information protection agreement that was shelved after former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak tried to push it through without public consent is on the table once again, this time as a three-way agreement between South Korea, the US, and Japan, senior South Korean officials say. With anti-Japanese sentiment in the South Korean public making it practically impossible to pass a bilateral agreement between the two countries, the US has been brought into the agreement.

“We believe that it is essential for South Korea, Japan, and the US to share information about North Korean nuclear weapons and missiles,” said South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin before the National Assembly’s National Defense Committee on Apr. 9. “In this sense, we agree on the need to consider signing an MOU between related organizations in the three countries.”

“The response that Defense Minister Kim provided the National Defense Committee reflects the government’s position. We agree with the need for the agreement on a military level,” a senior government official visiting Washington, D.C. confirmed during a meeting with South Korean Washington correspondents on Apr. 10. The official added that the form that this agreement would take would need to be determined through deliberations between officials in the three countries’ militaries. This indicates that, while the South Korean government has not yet decided whether the agreement will take the form of a treaty or an MOU, it has decided to join discussions with Japan and the US.

The South Korean government’s decision to move forward with an issue as sensitive as exchanging military information with Japan - despite heightened tensions over the fraught history between the two countries - is due to pressure from the US, sources say.

The US is seeking to strengthen the trilateral system of security cooperation with South Korea and Japan to respond to China’s growing military might and the North Korean nuclear program. The central elements in these efforts are the construction of a three-way missile defense system and exchange of military information between the three countries.

The US Defense Department said that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called Kim Kwan-jin on Apr. 10 to express his appreciation for Kim’s support for the Defense Trilateral Talks (DTT) between the three countries that will be held in Washington the following week and to tell him that the three countries must do everything in their power to strengthen trilateral cooperation to counter the threat posed by North Korea.

Currently, military information sharing agreements are in place between South Korea and the US and between the US and Japan, but not between South Korea and the Japan, as the US would like to see, reports suggest. Of course, the South Korean and Japanese militaries also agree about the need to share information about North Korea.

It also appears that the South Korean government expects that persuading the public will be easier by bringing the US into the equation. The government’s decision to promote the military information exchange agreement not as an official treaty but rather as an MOU appears to take into account the fact that an MOU, unlike a treaty, does not need to be ratified by parliament, and also that it does not involve any legal responsibility.

The Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun also reported on Apr. 11 that South Korea, Japan, and the US had begun considering the idea of signing a trilateral agreement about sharing military information. More specifically, the paper said, the idea was being floated of trading MOUs that would set the rules for exchanging and protecting information related to security secrets, and that it was possible that this issue could be discussed during the Defense Trilateral Talks (DTT) between the three countries that will take place in Washington the next week.

Defense Ministry spokesperson Kim Min-seok addressed the issue during a press briefing on Apr. 11. “In the case of Japan, there are a lot of unresolved issues and then there is public sentiment toward Japan, so this would only be possible if the necessary conditions were in place. For this reason, we decided not to talk about exchanging information during the meeting in Washington.”

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