SEOUL: South Korea will fully implement a significant military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan, an official from defence ministry told AFP on Saturday, as the two nations move to thaw long-frozen relations and resume diplomacy to counter North Korea.
At a fence-mending summit on Thursday, South Korea and Japan agreed to turn the page on a bitter dispute over later’s use of war-time forced labour.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who wished to end the spat and present a combined front against nuclear-armed North Korea, had flown to Japan to meet Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the first such summit in the last 12 years.
Pact between Seoul and Tokyo
According to reports, Yoon told Kishida he needed a “complete normalization” of a 2016 military agreement titled the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), which enables the two US partners to share military secrets, particularly over North’s missile and nuclear capacity.
After the summit, South Korea’s foreign ministry was asked “to proceed with the required measures to make the agreement normalized,” said a defence ministry official, who wanted not to be named.
The official further said that the foreign ministry was expected to send a formal letter to its Japanese counterpart in a few days.
South Korea had threatened to scrap GSOMIA in 2019 as relations with Japan soured over trade disputes and a historical row emerging from Japan’s 35-year colonial rule over the peninsula.
In response, an alarmed US said that winding off the pact would only benefit China and North Korea. – AFP
