By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
State-funded think tanks on foreign, defense and North Korean affairs have proposed that South Korea take the initiative in ending the Korean War by proposing a peace treaty on the Korean Peninsula to replace the ceasefire, military sources said Monday.
The institutions said the formal end to the armistice treaty signed at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War by the U.S.-led United Nations Command (UNC), North Korea and China should be declared before the Aug. 15 Liberation Day, they said.
The three major think tanks on security affairs are the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), the Institute of Foreign Affairs & National Security (IFAN) and the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU).
The proposal was made during a closed-door meeting in May, where officials from the presidential office for national security also attended, the sources said.
During the meeting, the participants reached a compromise on a KIDA-proposed four-point process to put a peace regime on the peninsula in place, they said.
In the first ``preparation'' stage, South Korea should push for a formal end to the Korean War before Aug. 15, as well as the establishment of a multilateral forum on the peace regime issue and an inter-Korean consultative body on military affairs.
A second inter-Korean summit is also high on the agenda in the initial stage.
``South Korea should seize the initiative in the discussions of a peace mechanism on the peninsula, as the country directly concerned, by spearheading the declaration of an end to the Korean War,'' a KIDA researcher who participated in the May meeting said, asking not to be identified.
Cheong Wa Dae was wary of speculations about the declaration.
``Nothing has been determined,'' presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-seon said. ``The KIDA's suggestions are merely the opinions of an individual research institute and thus could be studied in the decision-making process.''
North Korea has called for replacing the armistice with a peace treaty but tried to exclude South Korea from peace talks in the past on the grounds that the South did not sign the armistice.
In February, however, North Korea and five other participating nations at the six-party nuclear talks agreed to deal with the peace regime in a multilateral framework in parallel with discussions over ways to dismantle the North's nuclear weapons program.
The United States is also positive about the peace talks, which it considers an incentive for Pyongyang to pick up the pace of denuclearization aimed at disabling and sealing the North's main nuclear reactor in return for economic assistance and political concessions including the normalization of ties.
In the second ``entry'' stage, a committee to deal with the termination of the war is to be set up. The committee will be tasked with supervising the Military Demarcation Line and the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, according to KIDA.
The UNC is to play a role as an international peacekeeping organization in the second stage, it said. The North wants the UNC to be dismantled with an end to the war.
The third ``transitional'' stage is focused on completing the dismantlement of North Korean nuclear programs and putting a peace treaty in place. The roles and missions of the peace treaty committee are to be expanded and the UNC is to be replaced with a new international peacekeeping organization, according to the KIDA proposal.
In the last ``peace settlement'' stage, the two Koreas are to begin implementing arms reductions and eventually create a unified military command.