Major military drills to be halted

> S. Korea, US to announce suspension this week: Yonhap

SEOUL: South Korea and the US are expected to announce the suspension of “large-scale” military drills this week, with the provision that they would restart if North Korea failed to keep its promise to denuclearise, Yonhap news agency said yesterday.

Citing an unnamed government source, Yonhap said the suspension is likely to affect only major joint exercises, not more routine military training.

US President Donald Trump surprised officials in Seoul and Washington when he pledged to end “war games” after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last week.

Immediately after the announcement, US forces in Korea said they had received no guidance on stopping any drills, and South Korean officials said they were trying to figure out which exercises Trump was referring to.

However, in a sign Seoul may be open to suspending drills, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday his government would need to be flexible when it came to applying military pressure on North Korea if it was sincere about denuclearisation.

Moon said South Korea would carefully consider joint military drills with the United States and he asked his officials to cooperate with the US on the issue, his office said in a statement at the time.

Yonhap also reported yesterday that during military talks between the two Koreas on Thursday, South Korean officials asked their northern counterparts to relocate artillery 30km to 40km away from the heavily fortified military demarcation line that divides the two countries.

The South’s defence ministry denied it made such a request, Yonhap said.

The talks, the first in more than a decade, held in the border village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone (DMZ), followed an inter-Korean summit in April at which leaders of the two Koreas agreed to defuse tensions and cease “all hostile acts”.

The Koreas failed to reach any concrete agreement during those talks, officials said.

North Korea proposed to Seoul to disarm, on a trial basis, the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom, the only site in the DMZ where both countries’ soldiers stand almost face to face, the South’s presidential spokesman said.

About 28,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the Korean War which ended in 1953 in an armistice that left the two Koreas technically still at war.

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to South Korea, retired Admiral Harry Harris, backed the idea of a “pause” in major military exercises.

He said his understanding was that any suspension would involve only major military exercises and that regular training of US forces in South Korea would continue, although final decisions were up to the Department of Defence.

The US-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every year with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month.

The next major drill, Ulchi Freedom Guardian, is planned for the end of the summer. – Reuters