Korean War - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Moon urges US Move

The Daily Star — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 19:15:21 +0000

Formal Ending Korean War. Says N Korea willing to abolish all nuke weapons.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in yesterday called on the United States to move towards the nuclear-armed North’s demands for a declaration the Korean War is over, as the allies pursue increasingly different approaches towards Pyongyang.

Washington has shied away from a formal announcement that the 1950-53 conflict, when hostilities ceased with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, has ended, saying that the North must first take more steps towards giving up its atomic arsenal.

For its part Pyongyang — which long insisted it needed nuclear weapons to defend itself against a possible US invasion — has pledged only to work towards denuclearisation “of the Korean peninsula”, demanding simultaneous moves by Washington in return, with a peace declaration its first priority.

Moon emphasised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s resolve to abandon nuclear and missile programmes, that the North pursued in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions, and focus on the economy if regime security is guaranteed.

“The North has stopped all nuclear and missile tests, dismantled its only nuclear test site and is now dismantling its missile engine test facilities, and is promising to take steps toward dismantling its Yongbyon nuclear complex if the US takes corresponding measures,” Moon told the BBC.

“Declaring the end of the war is a political declaration that the US would end decades of hostile relations with the North,” he said.

“Moving towards such a process is the corresponding measure the US should take,” he added, according to a transcript released by the presidential Blue House.

The comments, made ahead of Moon’s departure Saturday for a tour of European capitals, emphasise the increasing differences between Seoul and Washington, which has 28,500 troops stationed in the South to defend it from its neighbour.

Experts say the offers made by the North will have little impact on its military capabilities, and Pyongyang itself has said it has no further need to test its weapons.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has expressed “discontent” with an inter-Korean military pact reached during last month’s summit in a rare sign of disagreement between the allies.

Source: https://www.thedailystar.net/asia/news/moon-urges-us-move-1646374

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How South Koreans Are Reckoning With a Changing American Military Presence

E. Tammy Kim — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:34:27 +0000

Media coverage in Seoul of President Donald Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea in June.CreditAhn Young-Joon/Associated Press

In late June, Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of United States Forces Korea, addressed a large uniformed crowd at an outdoor ceremony 40 miles south of Seoul. He christened a glittering new headquarters at United States Army Garrison Humphreys, usually referred to as Camp Humphreys, an American military base in the city of Pyeongtaek. Just two weeks earlier, President Donald Trump suggested in Singapore that American troops should be drawn down, if not removed altogether, from the Korean Peninsula, but Brooks made no mention in his remarks of any planned reduction, instead proclaiming that United States Forces Korea “will remain the living proof of the American commitment to the alliance.” In his own congratulatory message, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea said the partnership between his country and the United States has been “the foundation for peace and stability and paved the way for South Korea’s democratization and economic growth.”

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the United States has operated upward of 175 military installations in South Korea, a country the size of Kentucky. Today, that number is closer to 90, due to a massive consolidation. Fourteen years ago, the Americans and South Koreans agreed to close and relocate three major bases to the once-sleepy outpost of Camp Humphreys: two near the North Korean border and the third at Yongsan in Seoul, the longtime headquarters of United States Forces Korea and its largest component unit, the Eighth Army. Camp Humphreys has since been modernized and expanded to more than 3,500 acres, at a cost of nearly $11 billion, 90 percent paid for by South Korea. It is now the largest American military base overseas. When it is fully populated, sometime in the next few years (there is no official deadline), it will host more than 18,000 soldiers and an additional 27,000 civilian employees, contractors, retirees and family members.

In June, I visited Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek and United States Army Garrison Yongsan in Seoul to document the impact of the evolving military presence on Koreans and Americans. The recent summits between North and South Korea, and between the United States and North Korea, have shifted the conversation from “total destruction” to peace. And President Trump’s offhand remarks in Singapore — not only about withdrawing 32,000 American troops from South Korea but also about canceling a forthcoming joint-military exercise — serve as a reminder that the American presence is not an immutable fact.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony at Camp Humphreys in June.CreditAhn Young-Joon-Pool/Getty Images

For decades, every American soldier posted to South Korea attended orientation at the Yongsan Garrison, in central Seoul, before proceeding to his or her assigned base. Yongsan, meaning “dragon hill,” came into military use long before the Americans’ arrival. The Japanese, who colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, chose Yongsan as their army headquarters and built an array of walls, bridges, guard posts, offices and residences in brick and stone. After World War II, Korea was split at the 38th parallel, with the North controlled by the Soviets and the South by the Americans — the model for what would happen in Vietnam a decade later. The Korean War was fought over that boundary, when the North invaded the South. Seoul changed hands four times, and Pyongyang was carpet-bombed before the war ended in stalemate. Millions of civilians and service members were killed, and the peninsula was divided again along the same latitude.

Choi Chi-sun was born in August 1953, just after the signing of the armistice. His parents had been refugees from the north of the peninsula and eventually found themselves in Pyeongtaek, then a collection of farming villages populated by fewer than 100,000 residents. With its natural harbor and proximity to China, Pyeongtaek, like Yongsan, had been used by Japan’s imperial army. The Americans, defending the South against Northern and Chinese forces, inherited and expanded K-6, the Japanese airfield that would later be called Camp Humphreys, and added another base, K-55, farther north, forcing dozens of families from their land. Bases and airfields bearing American names became a feature of the postwar landscape.

Choi’s father found work as a plumber inside K-55, now known as the Osan Air Base, and Choi grew up in the gijichon, or military camptown, just outside its walls. “In the 1960s, everyone in Korea was very poor, but my dad at least had his job at the base to put us through school,” Choi said. “There were a lot of bad things about the gijichon’s ‘Yankee culture,’ including environmental damage and violence, but those of us who lived nearby saw the Americans as good, and we benefited from their presence.” Soldiers and Marines transported refugees to safety, distributed rations and supplies, employed maids and drivers and patronized local stores. “We were taught that unless and until an anti-Communist reunification occurred, the U.S. presence was necessary,” Choi said.ke So Long to See a Cast Like ‘Crazy Rich Asians’?

Much of the wartime generation still feels indebted to the Americans. During a Korean Memorial Day celebration, on June 6, in Seoul, I watched a large, elderly crowd wave American and South Korean flags to the 4-4 beat of martial music. Their sentiments were summed up by a friend of Choi’s, Lee Dae-sung, a retired elementary-school principal in Pyeongtaek who also grew up in a gijichon. “If it hadn’t been for the Americans, we would have all died at the hands of the Japanese,” he said. But this loyalty must contend with darker histories. In July 1950, the second month of the Korean War, American soldiers shot and killed an estimated 400 civilians in the southern village of No Gun Ri, a massacre that was not widely covered until 1999. And long after the war’s end, in the gijichon outside every American military base, servicemen abused waitresses and sex workers and left wives and children behind when they rotated out of the country.

In 1971, the Nixon Doctrine reduced the number of military personnel in South Korea by 20,000. South Korea was considered a hardship assignment, and most uniformed personnel stayed just a year (and still do today). Though United States Forces Korea was focused on defending against the Communist North, it backed successive autocratic regimes in the South. There were fatal crackdowns on student and labor activists, and anyone even remotely left-wing. In 1980, President Chun Doo-hwan oversaw the slaughter of protesters advocating democratic reforms in the southwestern city of Gwangju. The Carter administration acknowledged South Korea’s “need to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary by reinforcing the police with the army.” Just a few years later, though, after North Korea tried to assassinate Chun, the Americans restrained him from retaliating against Pyongyang.

Beginning in the late 1980s, South Korea fitfully transitioned into a democracy and became known for its “economic miracle.” A strengthened civil society brought forth the concerns of oppressed groups, including gijichon women. In 1992, an American soldier killed a sex worker named Yun Geum-i, and in 2002, an American military vehicle ran over two 14-year-old schoolgirls, Shin Hyo-soon and Shim Mi-sun, killing them. These and other crimes provoked large-scale protests throughout the country and, in 2003, prompted the newly elected president, Roh Moo-hyun, to negotiate the long-discussed consolidation of American troops within the confines of Camp Humphreys. The Americans, meanwhile, were eager to move soldiers and matériel to an updated facility farther away from the Demilitarized Zone.

For some residents of western Pyeongtaek, consolidation translated into another enormous disruption. Choi’s neighbors in the rice-farming village of Daechuri, on the border of Camp Humphreys, were marked for eviction. “There were people in Daechuri who wound up there because they were kicked off their land in 1952,” when K-6 and K-55 were established, Choi said. “These residents didn’t want to move yet again.” They fought back at public hearings and in court, and with pickets and sit-ins. Ten thousand Koreans marched through Pyeongtaek. When the diggers and bulldozers came at them, in 2005 and 2006, they tied themselves to roofs and fences and took fists and bamboo poles to the metal batons and shields and helmets of the South Korean riot police. It was no match. Hundreds of protesters were arrested, and the land was razed. The police filled irrigation ditches with concrete to prevent further cultivation.

Camp Humphreys is in one of the last agricultural sections of Pyeongtaek, a city whose population now exceeds half a million and is growing fast. More than a decade after what some people remember as the Daechuri War, the new Humphreys bears no obvious scars from the confrontation. As the headquarters of United States Forces Korea, it is at once larger and less conspicuous than its predecessor in megalopolitan Seoul. “Goodbye, Yongsan. Now it’s the Pyeongtaek era,” Korean news outlets have begun to proclaim. (The Yongsan Garrison is slated to become a public park once the Americans finish evacuating and the land is remediated, which could take decades.)

The privilege of being allowed to enter Camp Humphreys was not lost on me: As a journalist and the family member of an Army veteran, I had access to thousands of acres that most Koreans will never see. The turnstile of the walk-in gate gave way to Anytown, U.S.A. The streets inside were conspicuously wide; the asphalt was new. A queue of young men waited to use an A.T.M. that dispenses American dollars, and a redheaded girl zoomed by on a scooter. From a base shuttle bus, I looked out at miles of half-built apartment towers and office buildings, colossal equipment hangars, the Pacific Victors chapel, a child-care center and outdoor pavilions with Korean-style roofs. A row of California-style mansions (housing for “the stars” — the generals, in Korean parlance) butted up against a golf course and a pond. The capaciousness was jarring; I pictured the claustrophobic alleys of downtown Pyeongtaek just a few miles away.

Downtown Seoul.CreditJean Chung/Getty Images

Near the new Humphreys movie theater, which was playing the latest Marvel flick, I met a Korean contractor who had been moved from Yongsan. He was adjusting to life outside Seoul and the loss of longtime colleagues — he said many civilians had been fired during the consolidation. Pyeongtaek had also paid a price: “The land we’re standing on used to be grape farms.” In the mess hall of the Second Infantry Division, the unit relocated from the North Korean border, I ate macaroni and cheese and watched the Golden State Warriors celebrate their championship win. A soldier wearing shorts and a T-shirt at a nearby table said he had yet to explore the base, let alone Pyeongtaek city, though he arrived several months earlier. I wondered if he qualified as a “barracks rat,” the kind who prefers the confines of Anytown. “I came here when the tensions with North Korea were high,” he said. “The guys were excited because we thought it’d be World War III.” It was a crude but understandable comment: How odd to be a restless 20-something, dropped in the middle of Asia, no conflict in sight.

On another visit to Pyeongtaek, Maj. Zach Delabastide welcomed me to his off-base apartment. Delabastide is a physician assistant and a Trinidadian immigrant who began his tour last August. He lives in the Brown Stone, a shiny complex that caters to American military personnel; his wife and two children remain back home, near Fort Bragg in North Carolina. After two tours in Iraq and a three-year stint in Germany, Delabastide was surprised by how little he learned about Korea during his in-processing at Yongsan. “In Germany,” he said, “there’s an entire week on just language, culture and history. I was hoping for that here.” I asked Delabastide what his purpose was on the peninsula and how he felt about the recent spate of bilateral summits. “The tensions between all the countries involved have been going on for so long,” he said. “When the talks started, I felt optimistic, but also, why would it be different this time?” He was there, he said, to be in a perpetual state of “readiness,” in South Korea’s defense. As to the specifics, “There’s so many decisions being made that I never see,” Delabastide said. “People a lot smarter than me are thinking it through, seven steps ahead.”

Camp Humphreys seems vast enough to impede on the daily lives of every Pyeongtaek resident. But over the past decade, Pyeongtaek has branded itself a “new economic city,” partly in an attempt to move past its association with gijichon culture. The Korean technology giants LG and Samsung have built new factories in town, triggering a building boom of apartment towers, office parks, shopping malls, roads, bridges, a luxury Chinatown and express trains that connect to Seoul. Given all this development, “people in Pyeongtaek don’t really know about the base or don’t really care,” said Jeeyeon Han, the manager of the Pyeongtaek International Exchange Foundation. “But they do notice there are more Americans in the area.” Han has worked with Lanae Rivers-Woods, a native of Alaska who lives in Pyeongtaek and runs South of Seoul, a website and app catering to expatriates and military families, to draw American personnel beyond the strip of shops and restaurants outside the main Humphreys gate. Rivers-Woods took on the role of town evangelist when she realized that the ballooning military population was given no introduction to Korean customs, language or food. “The idea of 40,000 people who hate it here was scary to me,” she said.

In South Korea, protests against the United States military presence tend to be spurred by high-profile incidents or major construction projects. A sliver of the population, though, has maintained a steadfast resistance. Oh Hye-ran is on the staff of Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, or Spark, a Seoul-based nonprofit group that advocates the withdrawal of American forces and supports local activists near American bases and installations. In Spark’s humble book-lined offices, Oh explained that recent gestures toward peace between the two Koreas had given their cause hope. “When it comes to the North-South situation, North Korea doesn’t have the military capability. Even without the U.S., South Korea can defend itself,” she said. Spark was active in the fight against the Camp Humphreys expansion; its latest campaign is for the removal of Thaad, an American missile-defense system installed last year in the farming village of Soseong-ri.

While the Korean people may not agree on the desirability of the American military presence, “a pro-U.S. security consensus is fairly well embedded in domestic institutions and ideology,” according to Andrew Yeo, a professor at Catholic University. South Korean liberals and conservatives, while at odds in their rhetoric, are equally bound by the “norms that guide South Korean national-security strategy,” including an enduring alliance with the United States, Yeo writes in his book, “Activists, Alliances and Anti-U.S. Base Protests.” Fear of a rising China is similarly bipartisan: These days, it’s not uncommon to read op-eds by professors and politicians in the Korean press warning that “if the U.S. washes its hands and leaves, all of Northeast Asia will be left to the Chinese.”

Though the South Korean military is by no means anemic (618,000 uniformed personnel, universal male conscription, warships, submarines, missile-defense systems and fighter planes bought from American arms manufacturers), the foreign-policy establishment believes that American troops should, and will, remain in place. “I think it’s important, both in the face-off with North Korea and for regional and global stability,” said Jonathan Cristol, a research fellow at Adelphi University. Moon Chung-in, an adviser to President Moon, recently wrote that the suspension of joint-military exercises should not be construed as undermining “the alliance and combat readiness.”

Korean prosperity and power are insufficient, and unlikely, to displace the America-Korea alliance, according to Choi Chi-sun, the Pyeongtaek native. The residents of the gijichon know this best, he said: “They lived through the Nixon Doctrine. … They know that things won’t change quickly, that there won’t be reunification right away.” In 1987, after studying and working in Seoul, Choi returned with his family to his hometown. He built an electronics business and, in his off hours, became an amateur ethnographer of the area. “I wanted to capture the city’s disappearing history,” he said. “Pyeongtaek’s modern history is a microcosm of Korea — the economy, the military — all of it. And without the U.S. bases, you can’t tell the history of Pyeongtaek, past, present or future.”

E. Tammy Kim is a freelance writer and former attorney.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/magazine/south-korea-america-military.html

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U.S. military takes possession of remains that North Korea says belong to Americans who died in the Korean War

Adam Taylor and Dan Lamothe — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 02:18:56 +0000

Visitors look at the names of U.S. troops killed in the Korean War at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul. (Ahn Young-Joon/AP)

OSAN AIR BASE, South Korea — A U.S. Air Force plane carrying what are thought to be the remains of Americans killed during the Korean War arrived at Osan Air Base in South Korea on Friday morning, the 65th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting.

The U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft departed for the Kalma Airport in the North Korean city of Wonsan before 6 a.m. on Friday morning. It returned around 11 a.m. local time, where it was greeted by a crowd of several thousand U.S. servicemen and their families — all American servicemen in South Korea had been invited to the event.

IThe exchange means that one part of the agreement reached between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12 has been partially fulfilled — albeit more slowly than many had anticipated.

“Today’s actions represent a significant first step to recommence the repatriation of remains from North Korea and to resume field operations in North Korea to search for the estimated 5,300 Americans who have not yet returned home,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Thursday night.

The remains are expected to remain at Osan for a few days for initial testing, before a repatriation ceremony is held on Aug. 1 and they are sent on to Hawaii.

Yonhap News Agency reported Thursday that North Korea has accepted 100 wooden transit caskets that it plans to use to return the remains. The U.S. military command in South Korea moved the caskets into the demilitarized zone that splits the Korean Peninsula in late June.

Earlier Thursday, the expected recovery was greeted with cautious optimism by Rick Downes, executive director of a group of families whose loved ones never came home from the Korean War. They have watched discussions in recent weeks with a mixture of hope and cynicism, he said.

“These are poker chips, unfortunately,” said Downes, who runs the Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs. “These guys, these missing men, are still serving. The war still goes on, and they are being negotiated and used as a bargaining tool.”

[For the U.S., a frustrating history of recovering human remains in North Korea]

A U.S. official told The Washington Post last week that North Korea has agreed to hand over about 55 sets of remains. Friday was suggested as a likely date for the repatriation because of its symbolic importance as the anniversary of the armistice, but the official cautioned that the date could change and that the number of remains would need to be checked after they are handed over.

Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who has worked on repatriation issues and visited North Korea several times, said Thursday that he sees the potential recovery as a positive first step. But he warned that Pyongyang could stall in delivering other remains and attempt to use the issue as a way to make money.

“They’ll give a certain amount of remains for free right away,” Richardson predicted. “But then they’ll say, ‘The next ones, we need to find them, locate them, restore them.’ And then they’ll start charging, and they’ll milk this.”

Though the United States has a policy of refusing to pay for the repatriation of remains, in the past, it has agreed to provide some funding for expenses incurred by the North Koreans.

The Pentagon estimates that nearly 7,700 U.S. troops are unaccounted for from the war; among them are 5,300 believed to have been killed north of the 38th parallel, which largely coincides with the boundary between North and South Korea.

The North Korean government is believed to have somewhere between 120 and 200 sets of U.S. military remains in its possession and ready to deliver, but there are thousands more still in the North Korean countryside, said Mickey Bergman, vice president of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement that the former governor founded.

Some remains were buried by U.S. troops in cemeteries that were intended to be temporary until China’s entry in the Korean War forced U.S. forces to withdraw farther south. Other remains are at sites where aircraft crashed or in unmarked graves, Bergman said.

“One of the things that is so important is for the American people to understand that this is just the beginning,” he said. “This is going to take years. It’s going to take interviews and sight surveys and teams on the ground. My fear is that we will get these remains and once again say ‘Mission accomplished!’ And it’s not.”

After the remains are returned, scientific testing will be needed to confirm that they belong to American soldiers from the Korean War. In the past, North Korea has been accused of deliberately including non-American bones — even animal bones — in a bid to fool U.S. authorities.

The remains will be sent to Hawaii, where the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency runs a laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. The identification process there could take years, U.S. officials have said. It often includes a review of archival information that determines where certain U.S. troops were likely to have gone missing or been buried.

After the historic summit between the two leaders last month, Trump and Kim agreed to work together to recover U.S. remains left in North Korea and to implement the “immediate repatriation of those already identified.”

Only a few days after meeting Kim, Trump portrayed the return of the remains as something that had already happened. “We got back our great fallen heroes, the remains,” he told a campaign rally in Minnesota. “In fact, today, already 200 have been sent back.”

However, while the U.S. military had moved caskets into the Korean Peninsula’s joint security area in anticipation, no remains had been sent back. Soon, negotiations were dragging out longer than many had expected.

“That it took this long to secure such low-hanging fruit is a bad sign that North Korea intends to lean on its traditional negotiating posture,” Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official who teaches at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, said of the prospective repatriation.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was expected to return with remains when he visited Pyongyang for an overnight stay July 6. But after his team was criticized by the North Korean Foreign Ministry, his visit only highlighted tensions between the United States and North Korea over the return of the remains and issues surrounding denuclearization.

On July 12, North Korean military officials left their U.S. counterparts waiting for hours at the joint security area before belatedly calling to request that they reschedule their prearranged meeting. Only after this meeting and subsequent ones was practical progress made.

One part of the holdup appeared to be North Korean requests for payment.

The last time North Korea’s military returned likely remains of American troops was in 2005 amid escalating tensions with Pyongyang, when the United States halted a program that had been running since the 1990s.

In 2007, Richardson visited North Korea on a private mission that had the approval of the Bush administration. Richardson returned with the remains of six servicemen.

The return of the remains now would come after commercial satellite imagery appeared to show that North Korea had destroyed part of a satellite-testing facility that was part of the country’s missile-development program. Trump, who told reporters in June that North Korea had agreed to destroy that facility, said Tuesday that the United States appreciated the move.

Lamothe reported from Washington.

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/north-korea-expected-to-hand-over-us-remains-on-friday-s-korean-media-reports/2018/07/26/d06bf52a-90c9-11e8-9b0d-749fb254bc3d_story.html

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North & South Announce End of Korean War

CNN — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 08:03:05 +0000

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North and South Korea pledge to end war, denuclearize peninsula

Stephen Johnson — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:50:56 +0000

President Moon Jae-in and North Korean President Kim Jong Un meet in the truce village of Panmunjom (Photo by Korea Summit Press Pool/Getty Images)

In a historic summit on Friday, the leaders of North and South Korea vowed to officially end the Korean War and work toward the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.” The meeting marks the first time a North Korean leader has crossed the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone that separates the nations.

After holding meetings in the border truce village of Panmunjom, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean President Kim Jong Un issued a joint statement pledging to ease military tensions, pursue phased arm reductions, seek peace talks with the U.S., and transform the Demilitarized Zone into a “peace zone.”

“The two leaders declare before our people of 80 million and the entire world there will be no more war on the Korean peninsula and a new age of peace has begun,” the declaration said.

Surrounded by officials and photographers, Kim and Moon participated in a tree-planting ceremony. The tree was a pine from 1953, the year the Korean War armistice was signed. Afterward, they walked alone, side by side, to a footbridge where they had a 30-minute conversation, about which no recordings or notes were released.

Photo: Korea Summit Press Pool/Getty Images

The mood of the meeting appeared to be uncharacteristically peaceful and jovial. Kim even offered up a joke about waking Moon up with early-morning missile tests.

“I will make sure not to interrupt your sleep any more,” Kim said.

But the pledges from the summit were short on concrete details. The Panmunjom Declaration failed to specify the extent of Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal, or what Kim expects to receive in exchange for denuclearization–though the answer is likely economic growth.

“He is seeking the kind of rapid economic growth seen in China,” Lee Jong-seok, a former unification minister of South Korea, told the NYTimes. “The North Korea he envisions is different from his father’s North Korea.”

“We have looked only on the nuclear side of Kim Jong-un’s rule, trying hard not to look at the other side. He is ready to bargain away nuclear weapons for the sake of economic development. If he were content with just feeding his people three meals a day, he would not give up his nuclear weapons.”

It remains to be seen whether Pyongyang will follow through on its denuclearization pledge in light of North Korea’s history of breaking agreements with the U.S.

However, the meeting in Panmunjom sets a relatively optimistic tone for the upcoming summit between Kim and President Donald Trump, which is expected to happen in the upcoming months.

Source: http://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/north-and-south-korea-meeting-in-seoul-pledge-to-end-war-denuclearize-peninsula

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REPORT: North Korea, South Korea Set To Announce Official End To 64-Year-Long War

Joseph Curl — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 05:09:54 +0000

Chung Sung-Jun / Staff / Getty Images

Hostilities on the Korean peninsula ended on July 27, 1953, but the war didn’t.

On that day, the U.S., North Korea and China signed an armistice agreement designed to “insure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved,” according to the agreement.

Sixty-four years later, the war has never been officially declared over.

Now, though, North and South Korea are reportedly in talks to permanently end the war, daily newspaper Munhwa Ilbo reported Tuesday, according to CNBC.

Ahead of a summit next week between North Korean premier Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, lawmakers from the neighboring states were thought to be negotiating the details of a joint statement that could outline an end to the confrontation.

Kim and Moon could also discuss returning the heavily-fortified demilitarized zone separating them to its original state, the newspaper said.

Pyongyang and Seoul have technically been at war since the 1950-1953 Korean conflict ended with a truce — and not a peace treaty. Geopolitical tensions have occasionally flared up since the armistice, although to date both countries have managed to avoid another devastating conflict.

President Trump and the North Korean dictator are set to hold talks as early as next month.

North Korea has been softening its rhetoric of late. Reuters reported late last month that the North Korean leader has pledged his commitment to denuclearization and to meet U.S. officials.

“It is our consistent stand to be committed to denuclearization on the peninsula, in accordance with the will of late President Kim Il Sung and late General Secretary Kim Jong Il,” Kim Jong Un said, according to Xinhua. Kim is currently in China for a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump has pressed North Korea since taking office in January 2017. Moreover, he’s pushed China to do more about its belligerent neighbor, and taken some actions seen as overkill, like enacting tariffs on Chinese goods. But Trump’s efforts appear to have paid off, at least at this point.

China and North Korea have also met, which drew praise from Trump.

The post REPORT: North Korea, South Korea Set To Announce Official End To 64-Year-Long War first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.