제주평화연구원

  [caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] MOON Seong-Mook
Chief of Unification Strategy Center Korea Research Institute for National Strategy[/caption]

Every time I leave the Korean mainland to visit Jeju Island, I feel somehow warm and relaxed at the same time. I suppose this is exactly why they call it Jeju the Island of Peace. In the 2000s, Jeju Island also came to be known as a meaningful place to South and North Korea. It was on Jeju Island that high-level officials from the two Koreas met to discuss peace and cooperation. The first summit meeting since the division of Korea was held in Pyongyang on June 15, 2000, between the South's Kim Dae-jung and North's Kim Jong-il, which resulted in the adoption of the Joint Declaration of South and North Korea. In a follow-up to the inter-Korean summit talks, ministerial-level meetings took place twice on Jeju Island.

It was between defense ministers that the first round of ministerial talks were held on Jeju. Their meeting, which was arranged to discuss how to implement defense-related agreements of the June 15 Declaration, marked the first time since the Korean War that the defense chiefs of the two Koreas sat together for a meeting. Initially, North Korea proposed the talks be held in a third country. The North changed its mind later, however, proposing that the meeting take place on Jeju, to which South Korea agreed, resulting in 2000's three-day ministerial-level talks from Sept. 24 to 26 at the Lotte Hotel Jeju. It appears that North Korea might have thought that it could ease its political burden by holding the talks on Jeju because of its distance from mainland Korea. North Korea might have been uncomfortable with the idea of sending its top defense officials to a heavily populated metropolis such as Seoul for talks amid the tense military confrontation. South Korea’s Defense Minister Cho Sung-tae and North Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Il-chol led their respective delegations at the ministerial talks. The 13-member North Korean delegation drove down to Seoul via the truce village of Panmunjom, from where a CN-235 transport aircraft provided by the South Korean Air Force flew them to Jeju. In the three-day talks, South and North Korea agreed on a five-point statement, stipulating that two Koreas make efforts to reduce tension and prevent war that military authorities on both sides should support and safeguard inter-Korean exchanges and that they pursue the relinking of the inter-Korean railway under the armistice treaty, among others. Under these agreements, the two sides met again later in November that year for working-level military talks, which successfully resulted in the clearance of landmines in certain areas of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to allow the reconnecting of the inter-Korean railroads and highways for the construction of new border-crossing routes to the Kaesong Industrial Complex and the Mt. Kumkang tourist zone. The second ministerial talks held in Jeju were attended this time by higher level delegates responsible for the implementation of the Pyongyang summit agreements. South Korea’s unification minister and North Korea’s senior cabinet councilor participated in the third round in a series of ministerial-level talks on Jeju Island. The meeting ran for four days from Sept. 27 to 30, shortly after the first ministerial talks between the two defense chiefs from both sides. The meeting ended with an agreement on a six-point statement that called on both Koreas to take measures for a prompt settlement of issues related to separated families to establish a Committee for the Promotion of Inter-Korean Economic Cooperation to discuss economic exchanges and cooperation to expand academic, cultural and athletic exchanges and cooperation and to arrange for regular soccer matches in Seoul and Pyongyang. As many as 16 years have passed since these meetings took place. Since then, North Korea has conducted four nuclear tests and six rocket and missile launches. Pyongyang also sank the South Korean warship Cheonan, fired artillery shells at the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong in 2010, and planted wooden-box landmines in the DMZ last August, which have driven the inter-Korean relations to their worst state in decades. Operations of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, touted as the last bastion of hope for South-North relations, have come to a complete stop. The South Korean government shut down Kaesong complex, because it saw a high possibility that the currency paid to North Korea in the process of inter-Korean cooperation, including wages for workers at the complex, may have been used to develop weapons of mass destruction and finance the country's dictatorship under Kim Jong-un. Despite the agreements at the two summits between leaders of the two Koreas, Pyongyang has hardly shown an interest in improving relations with Seoul, going all out instead to build up nuclear and missile capabilities. Now, North Korea's nuclear and missile programs are not a looming threat, but a clear and present danger. The reality is that it is impossible to achieve true peace on the Korean Peninsula or the long-sought for reunification of Korea, not to mention improvement in South-North relations, as long as the North Korea nuclear problem remains unsolved. Besides, the international community is responding to North Korea’s nuclear threats with unprecedented sanctions to resolve the nuclear issue. There is a global consensus that Kim Jong-un should no longer be allowed to resort to his “Byungjin Line”—the country’s policy of pursuing the parallel goals of economic development and a robust nuclear weapons program. I look forward to Seoul and Pyongyang finding a breakthrough as soon as possible, paving the way for ministers from the two sides to sit down for talks again on this Island of Peace.