North Korea to top summit agenda

President Park Geun-hye waves before leaving for the United States from Seoul Airport in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, Sunday. During her first overseas trip after inauguration, Park is scheduled to have a summit with U.S. President Barack Obama, Tuesday.
Yonhap

By Kim Tae-gyu

The strengthened alliance between Seoul and Washington and North Korean policies are expected to be the top agenda items of the summit of the two countries leaders set for May 7.

President Park Geun-hye left Seoul Sunday to meet with her U.S. counterpart Barack Obama in the White House to come up with a declaration to mark the 60th anniversary of their alliance.

Presidential spokesman Yoon Chang-jung said last week that the upcoming summit, in particular the joint declaration, would be about broader and deeper collaboration between the long-time allies.

Political observers point out that broadened cooperation is directly linked to policies on North Korea at a time tensions are running high on the Korean Peninsula, due to the belligerent regimes continued threats.

Many worry the meeting might provoke North Korea further in an already tense relationship after the inter-Korean joint industrial zone in the Norths border city of Gaeseong closed.

Ostensibly, the foremost agenda would be the cooperation of South Korea and the United States. But the topic that draws the biggest attention is their talks on North Korea policies, said Prof. Yang Moo-jin at the University of North Korean Studies.

And chances are that their joint declaration would be about the repetition of previous principles of urging the North to give up its nuclear ambitions.

They might not help resolve the problems.

Chang Yong-seok, a researcher at the Institute for Peace and Unification affiliated with Seoul National University, presented similar views.

As the Gaeseong case weighs on the inter-Korean relationships, Park and Obama are likely to announce a joint declaration of pressuring the North in stronger fashion, Chang said.

That might provoke Pyongyang.

Then, I am concerned that the decade-old inter-Korean venture on the Gaeseong complex will follow the suit of the Mt. Geumgang tourism programs.

In the midst of increasing tension after its missile and nuclear tests, North Korea banned access to Gaeseong and removed its 53,000 workers from the zone last month.

After the North snubbed an offer for dialogue, Seoul reciprocated by withdrawing all of its employees who worked for 123 South Korean countries in the city just north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

In 1998, tourism programs began to take South Koreans to the scenic area of Mt. Geumgang via cruise ship. A land route to the enclave was added in 2003 and drew millions of South Koreans.

However, the tours were stopped in 2008 after a female South Korean tourist was shot dead at the resort by a North Korean guard. Later, Pyongyang confiscated the assets of South Korean firms.

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Also on the mind of Park is a regional peace pact that includes the two Koreas, China and Japan, which she said she will discuss with the United States during her visit.

We need to take steps to ensure peace where we can, Park said last month during a luncheon meeting with a group of newspaper and television news managing editors at Cheong Wa Dae.

Adding North Korea will be invited, she said what she termed the Seoul Process is aimed at building trust among Northeast Asian countries.

We may start with joint steps against terrorism, climate change and nuclear power, Park said. She also disclosed her plan to take the idea to the May 7 summit with Obama.

Park has lamented the political discord among countries in the region in spite of their strong economic ties.

Calling the phenomena, the Asia Paradox, Park will try to address it through building trust based on Seoul Process.

The envisioned proposal is in line with Parks philosophies of stressing trust in international relationship as amply demonstrated by Korean Peninsula Trust Process geared toward engaging Pyongyang.

It is a carrot-and-stick approach of sternly responding any provocations while continuing efforts of bringing the isolated regime to the negotiation tables.

Details of the Seoul Process have yet to be revealed but it is expected to be a more realistic version of the Northeast Asian Union, a brainchild of the former Roh Moo-hyun administration.

By and large, it attempted to first bring South Korea closer to China and Japan on the economic front before political cooperation was sought.

Other issues

Also potentially included in summit topics are the Korea-U.S. Atomic Energy Agreement and the forthcoming transition of wartime operational command (OPCON).

South Korea wants to recycle its spent nuclear fuel as it has almost filled the capacity of makeshift storage facilities built just next to nuclear reactors in four plants.

But the U.S. is opposed to the idea on the ground that processed fuel could be used to create nuclear arms.

Originally, the bilateral agreement was supposed to expire early in 2014 but the two sides agreed last month to extend the pact signed in the early 1970s by two more years, to 2016.

They agreed to discuss the deal every three months and observers expect the two state leaders will discuss the thorny issue as Seoul must do something as its storage capacity is fast running out.

South Korea regards the two-year extension of the deal as a stopgap measure that cannot address the dearth of facilities to store highly-radioactive nuclear waste.

Just after the Korean War (1950-53) broke out, the South gave both wartime and peacetime operational control of its troops to the United States.

Washington returned peacetime control in Dec. 1994 and was scheduled to hand over wartime command in April 2012, but the schedule was postponed to Dec. 2015 under previous President Lee Myung-bak.

Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin reiterated the transfer of OPCON will take place as initially planned and in tandem with that, this years joint Korea-U.S. military Key Resolve exercise was headed by South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first time.

However, some politicians and veterans have continued to ask for a delay as North Korea ratcheted up threats in the aftermath of its third atomic test on Feb. 12 and the resulting U.N. sanctions.

Furthermore, Park is predicted to take issue with Seouls contribution to the U.S. Forces here, which has become a tricky topic over the past few years. As of now, a 28,000-strong U.S. military contingent stays in South Korea.