hankyoreh

Hong Min

By Hong Min, researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification

It’s been nearly three years since South and North Korea reached their military agreement on Sept. 19, 2018. The time has come to look back objectively on what has been achieved and what still needs to be addressed.

There are many different people offering clearly different takes. Some call it a meaningful agreement that upholds the terms of the Armistice Agreement; others are more critical, suggesting that it may have contributed to weakening our military readiness posture.

To determine which assessment is more appropriate, we need an understanding that is rooted more in objective facts, while distancing ourselves from more subjective impressions and politicized frames. Our chief standard should be the extent to which the intent and goals of the Sept. 19 military agreement and the outcomes of its implementation are consistent rather than in conflict with each other.

The military agreement’s aim is to relax military tensions, preventing unintended clashes through a mutual suspension of hostile activities between South and North. It also included provisions about taking steps to establish peace on the Korean Peninsula, including the development of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into a peace region and the establishment of peaceful waters in the West Sea.

So how has that worked out in terms of practice?

Both South and North have complied fully with the suspension of hostile activities in border regions. As a result, military stability is greater than it has ever been.

Between the signing of the Armistice Agreement and the conclusion of the military agreement, North Korea engaged in somewhere in the range of 3,000 hostile acts. Over the past three years, there has not been a single military clash between South and North.

That numerical absence of clashes is an objective fact attesting to the effects of the military agreement.

The first-ever exhumation of human remains within the DMZ has also taken place as an implementation of the Sept. 19 military agreement. The Joint Security Area (JSA), once a symbol of antagonism, has been completely “demilitarized.”

If things continue in this way, we are unlikely to see any clashes here like the exchange of gunfire that happened in Panmunjom in 2017.

Among the posts from which guards were withdrawn as a pilot measure, three of them — in the Paju, Cheorwon, and Goseong regions — have been opened up to the DMZ Peace Trail. Visitors here can sense peace in a way they never could have imagined in the history of a divided peninsula.

To be sure, there are some areas where no progress has been made in terms of concrete steps, and there are hurdles that still need to be overcome.

But it’s tough to deny that the present situation alone shows how significant the military agreement is in its meaning and outcomes. We may still be in the early stages when it comes to relaxing tensions and building trust, but it’s time for us to focus more attention on working to firmly establish peace, rather than arguing about the “results.”

In that sense, it’s worth pondering the lesson learned from arms controls in Europe.

During the Cold War, Europe was the scene of acute military tensions and an antagonistic race in conventional weaponry. Massive amounts of conventional weapons were stockpiled by the US and Soviet sides through the frameworks of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Treaty Organization. Over 1.75 million heavily armed ground troops were deployed on the Eastern and Western sides.

To overcome this security dilemma, the two sides launched the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1973.

Due to a lack of binding force, the conference achieved little early on beyond agreements toward basic trust-building. But the two sides worked to beef up its scrutiny and binding forces with approaches such as increased intelligence exchanges and mutual monitoring.

This yielded results in 1995 with the formal institution of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. It ultimately led to a successful example of arms reduction in the form of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

Even this European success story took 22 years to achieve between the initial agreement on military trust building and the organization’s official launch. The Sept. 19 military agreement between South and North Korea has been in effect for just three years.

Rather than debating the “right” and “wrong” of the current agreement, we need to be thinking about what needs to be done to achieve practical progress with its implementation.

Some have voiced concerns about North Korea’s recent activities, but that doesn’t mean we should allow the last three years of peace to simply end. The key thing right now is finding ways of translating that military stability in the border region into peace and trust-building throughout the Korean Peninsula.

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