Moon pledges fresh campaign for peace
SEOUL: South Korea’s Moon Jae-in vowed to make another push for peace in his final months as president, despite fresh signs that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has little interest in reciprocating.
Mr Moon used his last new year address as president to press for a cause that has defined his political career. The former democracy campaigner and son of wartime refugees from North Korea is slated to leave office in May having made little progress in the peace process since signing a pair of landmark agreements with Mr Kim in 2018.
“All Koreans have long aspired to peace, prosperity, and unification,” Mr Moon said. “I will continue to make efforts to institutionalise sustainable peace, and I won’t stop that until the end of my term.”
“We are a divided country and we have been through war. There is nothing more precious than peace to us,” he added.
Mr Moon saw his role as an intermediary between Washington and Pyongyang diminish after he helped broker the first summit between Mr Kim and then-President Donald Trump more than three years ago in Singapore. The South Korean president has long advocated an end-of-war declaration as a way to ease North Korean suspicions that America’s goal is to remove Mr Kim from power.
Mr Trump rejected Mr Kim’s demands to lift sanctions and walked away from their second summit in Hanoi in February 2019. Pyongyang, in turn, has rebuffed Mr Moon’s attempts at rapprochement, labelled him meddlesome and in June 2020 destroyed the inter-Korean liaison office that had been the most visible symbol of Mr Moon’s quest for warmer ties.
“It is true that we still have a long way to go,” Mr Moon said, arguing that, “if we talk again and cooperate, the international community will also respond. Our government, if given the opportunity, will seek a path for the normalisation of inter-Korean relations and the irreversible peace.”