South Korea moves to 'normalise' military pact with Japan

South Korea moves to 'normalise' military pact with Japan
by AFP Staff Writers
Seoul (AFP) March 18, 2023

South Korea will fully implement a key military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan, a defence ministry official told AFP on Saturday, as the two countries move to thaw long-frozen relations and renew diplomacy to counter Pyongyang.

At a fence-mending summit on Thursday, the neighbours agreed to turn the page on a bitter dispute over Japan's use of war-time forced labour.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has been keen to end the spat and present a united front against the nuclear-armed North, had flown to Japan to meet Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the first such summit in 12 years.

According to a pool report, Yoon told Kishida he wanted a "complete normalisation" of a 2016 military agreement called the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), which enables the two US allies to share military secrets, particularly over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile capacity.

Following the summit, South Korea's foreign ministry was asked "to proceed with the needed measures to normalise the agreement," said a defence ministry official, who declined to be named.

The foreign ministry is expected to send a formal letter to its Japanese counterpart soon, the official added.

Seoul had threatened to scrap GSOMIA in 2019 as relations with Tokyo soured over trade disputes and a historical row stemming from Japan's 35-year colonial rule over the peninsula.

In response, an alarmed United States said that calling off the pact would only benefit North Korea and China.

Hours before it was set to expire, South Korea agreed to extend GSOMIA "conditionally", but warned it could be "terminated" at any moment.

Confronted with Pyongyang's growing aggression and flurry of missile tests, the neighbours have increasingly sought to bury the hatchet.

The increasing security challenge was thrown into sharp relief just before Yoon's arrival in Tokyo on Thursday as North Korea test-fired what it said was an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Last year, Pyongyang declared itself an "irreversible" nuclear power, and recently leader Kim Jong Un called for an "exponential" increase in weapons production.

Japan, Germany pledge closer ties as Scholz visits Tokyo
Tokyo (AFP) March 18, 2023 - Japan and Germany pledged closer defence ties and cooperation on diversifying supply chains as Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met in Tokyo Saturday.

Scholz is on his second trip to Japan in less than a year, and came with six ministers for government-to-government talks as Berlin works to boost its profile in the Asia-Pacific region, and ahead of the G7 summit being hosted this May by Japan in Hiroshima.

There were few concrete results outlined by the leaders, but both stressed the need to strengthen and diversify supply chains hit by everything from the pandemic to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"In our conversations about economic security, we talked about beefing up supply chains," said Kishida.

Both nations want to strengthen "their influence in strategic sectors, including mineral resources, semiconductors and batteries, and share best practices to address risks," he said.

Bitten by its reliance on Russian energy since the invasion of Ukraine, Germany has been battling to pivot away from other economic dependencies, in particular on China.

It has also been ramping up overtures to Asian nations including Japan, Indonesia and India, as it tries to diversify its supplies and exports alike.

Scholz said relations with Japan had been raised to a "new level" in Saturday's talks and that both countries were keen to learn the "right lessons" from the economic dependencies revealed by pandemic disruptions and the war in Ukraine.

Kishida, who is in the midst of a diplomatic blitz including talks with the leaders of South Korea and India, said the war in Ukraine had made it all the more important for Japan and Germany to step up security cooperation.

A joint statement issued by the defence ministers of both countries said they would work on new deployments by Germany's military in the region, as well as joint exercises.

They also pledged "a legal framework facilitating joint activities" by both militaries.

Scholz said the German military would carry out a tour of the Asia-Pacific region "in coming years".

German and Japanese fighter jets carried out joint exercises in Japan last September.