SEOUL: South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Wednesday it would consider suspending a 2018 deal that created maritime buffer zones with the North if Pyongyang “violates” Seoul territory again.
The agreement, reached during a period of high diplomacy at a summit in Pyongyang, aimed to reduce military tensions along the heavily fortified border.
At the time, the two sides had agreed to “cease various military exercises directed against each other along the military demarcation line“, but Pyongyang began to repeatedly violate the agreement last year.
North Korea has fired artillery rounds into the maritime buffer zones designated by the agreement several times in 2022, and last week sent five drones across the border into South Korean airspace.
The violations prompted growing calls from ruling party lawmakers for the hawkish Yoon administration to roll back the four-year-old agreement, signed under the then president. Moon Jae-in.
On Wednesday, Yoon asked his security assistants “to consider suspending the military agreement if the North commits another provocation that violates our territory,” spokeswoman Kim Eun-hye told reporters.
Yoon also called for “large-scale production of small, hard-to-detect drones by the end of the year” and the creation of a multi-purpose drone unit for “overwhelming counter-offensive capability”. .
the North Korean drone incursionthe first such incident in five years, prompted an apology from Seoul’s defense minister after the military failed to shoot down any of the unmanned aircraft despite jamming the jets for a five-hour operation.
Abandoning the 2018 accord “would increase the risk of heightened military tensions and a real clash in the border areas,” Hong Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification told AFP.
Although Pyongyang violated the agreement, the deal still helped “prevent a major military confrontation”, he said.
“It will be a whole other story if Yoon puts an official and political end to the agreement.”
The agreement, reached during a period of high diplomacy at a summit in Pyongyang, aimed to reduce military tensions along the heavily fortified border.
At the time, the two sides had agreed to “cease various military exercises directed against each other along the military demarcation line“, but Pyongyang began to repeatedly violate the agreement last year.
North Korea has fired artillery rounds into the maritime buffer zones designated by the agreement several times in 2022, and last week sent five drones across the border into South Korean airspace.
The violations prompted growing calls from ruling party lawmakers for the hawkish Yoon administration to roll back the four-year-old agreement, signed under the then president. Moon Jae-in.
On Wednesday, Yoon asked his security assistants “to consider suspending the military agreement if the North commits another provocation that violates our territory,” spokeswoman Kim Eun-hye told reporters.
Yoon also called for “large-scale production of small, hard-to-detect drones by the end of the year” and the creation of a multi-purpose drone unit for “overwhelming counter-offensive capability”. .
the North Korean drone incursionthe first such incident in five years, prompted an apology from Seoul’s defense minister after the military failed to shoot down any of the unmanned aircraft despite jamming the jets for a five-hour operation.
Abandoning the 2018 accord “would increase the risk of heightened military tensions and a real clash in the border areas,” Hong Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification told AFP.
Although Pyongyang violated the agreement, the deal still helped “prevent a major military confrontation”, he said.
“It will be a whole other story if Yoon puts an official and political end to the agreement.”
