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Shin Bong-kil

The first track 1.5 inter-Korean meeting since President Moon Jae-in took office is taking place in Sweden.

Sweden’s Institute for Security & Development Policy (ISDP) will be kicking off a private two-day forum in Stockholm on May 31, which is to be attended by experts and government figures from South and North Korea, the US, and China, multiple foreign affairs sources reported on May 31. One of the South Korean attendees will be Shin Bong-kil, a visiting professor at the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies.

The North Korean attendees will reportedly include figures from the Foreign Ministry’s Disarmament and Peace Institute. From the US, former White House aide and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Sue Mi Terry and Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Bruce Klingner will reportedly be attending.

ISDP invited experts from South and North Korea, China, and Japan for a Dec. 2016 forum on crisis management on the Korean Peninsula. In Feb. 2015, it organized a discussion on the Korean Peninsula that was attended by Shin - then director of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security - and figures from the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Disarmament and Peace Institute.

The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is maintaining that the event is nothing special, as not all of the South and North Korea attendees are government officials and ISDP has held similar debates every year. But the meeting is drawing attention as the first held since the arrival of the Moon administration, which unlike past governments has expressed a willingness to have dialogue with Pyongyang. Also attracting notice is the attendance on South Korea’s behalf by Shin, formerly active member of the diplomats’ group National Agrément, which advised Moon on foreign policy and national security during his election campaign. National Agrément was also chaired by Chung Eui-yong, who is now head of the Blue House Office of National Security. Also, because a research institute affiliated with the North Korean Foreign Ministry is a de facto part of the government organization, the next question is if the event leads to the administration’s first exploratory inter-Korean dialogue.

By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter

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