As the dust begins to settle following Friday’s remarkable summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, Chairman Kim Jong-un and President Moon Jae-in, attention will now inevitably turn to the next big event: the first ever face-to-face meeting between a sitting U.S. President and a leader of North Korea. Loosely planned for late May or early June, the stage has now been set by the leaders of the two Koreas and their agreement, the “Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula.”
Whereas expectations were broadly for more style than substance, the Declaration is in fact rather heavy on content. Along with numerous ways in which the Korean peoples are to be brought together – joint participation in sporting events, reunions of families split by the new border after the armistice, and a broad array of exchanges – the Declaration lays out a plan to pursue several welcome military risk reduction mechanisms, along with an agreement to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other.” But the devil is in the details.
On the last point, for example, the agreement specifically mentions an end to the broadcast of propaganda through loudspeakers at the border, and to the distribution by balloon of leaflets and other media into the North by Southern non-governmental organizations. Will Moon’s government act to restrict the freedom of expression of its citizens in deference to the North’s sensibilities? If it does, then that sets a worrying precedent for North Korean influence over South Korean society. And if it instead chooses to request rather than compel its citizens to comply, and those requests are not heeded, what then from the North Korean side?
Perhaps these issues were laid out in private. But a lot does seem to have been left unsaid between Moon and Kim. Human rights issues were firmly off the agenda, for instance. So the catalogue of North Korean abuses – which a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found in 2013 amounted to crimes against humanity – remains unaddressed. It was only last year too that Kim’s brother, Kim Jong-nam, was murdered in a Malaysian airport by agents of North Korea using the nerve agent VX. But of chemical and biological weapons, no mention.
This shows just how far we are from serious progress on the difficult issues, foremost of which is the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Here the Declaration merely reaffirmed a long-standing but vague joint commitment to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. Given how that commitment has been made and broken in the past, this cannot be taken as movement from Pyongyang.
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01.24.2025