The defense ministry has proposed to the United States that South Korea’s military jointly manage parts of the southern half of the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas, a source said Thursday.
The proposal came as the South Korean government aims to secure control of civilian access to the 250-kilometer-long, 4-km-wide stretch of the DMZ. Currently, the U.S.-led U.N. Command (UNC) administers the military buffer zone as the south-side enforcer of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
Amid the UNC’s outright objection to Seoul’s move, the defense ministry proposed a measure under which South Korea’s military oversees entry to parts of areas located south of the barbed-wire fence within the DMZ.
The South’s fence technically runs alongside the southern boundary of the DMZ, or the Southern Limit Line (SLL), located 2 km south of the Military Demarcation Line, the inter-Korean border.
But parts of the fence were installed north of the SLL to overcome geographic limitations for surveillance operations. The size of the area is known to account for roughly 30 percent of the southern half of the DMZ.
In addition to making the request to the UNC, the ministry also seeks to include the issue as an agenda item in bilateral defense talks, such as the Korea-U.S. Integrated Defense Dialogue and the Security Consultative Meeting, the source said.
The issue of DMZ access control has come into the spotlight since Unification Minister Chung Dong-young voiced his support for pending bills seeking to grant the South Korean government control of nonmilitary access to the DMZ.
Chung has also vowed to restore three sectors of the DMZ Peace Trail, which are situated within the DMZ, as part of the Lee Jae Myung government’s push to restore inter-Korean trust.
The UNC has voiced strong opposition against the pending bills, saying they are “completely at odds” with the armistice agreement.
“If the legislation passes, a rational, logical, legal interpretation is that the ROK government has removed itself from the armistice and is no longer bound by it,” a UNC official told reporters last month, referring to South Korea by the acronym of its formal name, the Republic of Korea.
In a rare statement issued in December, the UNC also stressed that it has been the “successful administrator” of the DMZ since 1953 to ensure that “military and civilian movements within the DMZ and other activities uphold the terms and the spirit of the armistice in the interest of stability.”
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