Seoul: South Korean President Moon Jae-in swears on Monday to use his last months in the office to suppress diplomatic breakthroughs with North Korea, despite public silence from Pyongyang for his efforts to declaration of peace between the two parties.
“The government will pursue the normalization of inter-Korean relations and irreversible roads for peace to the end,” said Moon in his last new year’s address before the five-year period ended in May.
“I hope efforts to dialogue will continue in the next government too.” In its own address on New Year’s Eve, North Korean leader Kim Jong United Nations did not mention Moon’s call for the declaration officially ended the 1950-1953 Korean War, or Denuclearization talks that were jammed with the United States.
Moon held several peaks with Kim, including once in Pyongyang, during the busy negotiations in 2018 and 2019, before the conversation stopped in the midst of international demands that the north handed over its nuclear weapons, and Pyongyang’s call to facilitate sanctions and drop “other hostile policies.” The moon pushed the “final war declaration” as a way to start traffic jams and his government had signaled backchannel discussions.
But North Korea did not openly respond to the latest boost, and the United States said it supports the idea but can disagree with the south over time.
“It is true that there is still a long way to go,” the moon admitted, but argued that if inter-Korean relations increased, the international community would follow.
Moon said his outreach to North Korea had been activated by a large military buildup that helped make South Korea safer.
“The peace is possible on strong security,” he said.
Pandemic Covid-19 showed the deadlock with North Korea, when Pyongyang put the country into unprecedented locking and months facing domestic pressure to climb the main plague of the first Coronavirus outside China in early 2020.
Since then, South Korea uses aggressive tracking and Track, as well as social distance rules and late but thorough vaccination campaigns to maintain the overall case and death are relatively low by global standards.