By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
North Korea filed strong a complaint against the forthcoming joint military exercises by South Korean and U.S. troops during high-level military talks with the U.S-led United Nations Command (UNC), Monday, the first of their kind in more than six years, UNC officials said.
The half-hour meeting at the truce village of Panmunjeom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas was aimed at discussing tension-reducing measures, they said.
Maj. Gen. Johnny A. Weida, deputy chief of staff for the UNC, represented the UNC at the meeting, while Maj. Gen. Kwak Chul-hee led the North's delegation.
``North Korea filed lengthy complaints against the Key Resolve/Foal Eagle exercises and the situation involving the U.S. military deployment on the Korean Peninsula,'' a UNC official said after the talks. In response, the UNC reaffirmed that the exercise was a defense-oriented one, he said.
South Korean and U.S. troops plan to hold the annual exercises from March 9 to 20 in multiple locations throughout South Korea. The joint war games will involve about 12,000 U.S. troops stationed here and 14,000 from off-peninsula, along with an unidentified number of South Korean forces.
The Key Resolve exercise, formerly known as RSOI (Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration), is a simulation-driven, defense-oriented combined command-post exercise intended to evaluate the allied forces' capability to receive forces from bases outside the country in the case of an emergency on the peninsula.
Foal Eagle is a theater-wide combined field exercise. It involves massive joint field operations, including rear area security and stability operations, special operations, ground maneuvers, and amphibious and combat air operations. Approximately 20,000 South Korean troops from corps-level units of the Army, Navy and Air Force are to take part in the exercise, according to officials from Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff.
North Korea regularly denounces joint drills by South Korea and the United States as a rehearsal for invading the North.
Monday's talks came as tension is growing on the Korean Peninsula over North Korea's alleged move to test-fire a long-range missile that could hit parts of the United States.
``North Korea requested this meeting to discuss tension reduction on the Korean Peninsula,'' the UNC, which has taken charge of supervising the truce between both Koreas since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, said in a news release. ``The United Nations Command sees the North Korean request for these general officer-level talks to start again as positive.''
Talks at this level have not been held since September 2002.
These talks can be useful in building trust and preventing misunderstanding, as well as introducing transparency regarding the intentions of both sides, said the release.
Some North Korea observers said Pyongyang's proposal for talks with the U.S.-led command were part of its long-time tactic to isolate South Korea in discussing political and military affairs.
The North has often argued South Korea is not a party concerned with the ceasefire agreement on the peninsula, which was signed between the UNC, North Korea and China.
Others said the North was also expected to deliver its arguments against annual military drills of South Korean and U.S. forces and shift blame to the UNC and South Korea for potential conflicts near the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), and the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea, said the observers.
Currently, a four-star U.S. general assumes the commands of the UNC, U.S. Forces Korea and Combined Forces Command. About 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed here as a deterrent against North Korea.
On Feb. 28, the communist state accused U.S. troops in South Korea of taking provocative acts in the buffer zone along the DMZ.
In a statement carried by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency, North Korea claimed U.S. soldiers were stalking in groups in the DMZ, a four-kilometer-wide buffer zone dividing the peninsula.
It said 62 U.S. military personnel and 58 vehicles entered the zone and got as close as 100 meters to the MDL, the zone's central division, on as many as 66 occasions up to Feb. 20.
On Jan. 5 and Jan. 21, U.S. troops came as close as 30 meters to the MDL and took photographs of a North Korean guard post and monitored the movement of North Korean vehicles, it said.
The UNC and South Korea's Ministry of National Defense dismissed the warning, saying that U.S. soldiers were engaged in ``legitimate'' monitoring acts on the South side of the buffer zone as part of UNC operations.