The government belatedly admitted on Tuesday that it signed a provisional military intelligence pact with Japan in April but kept it under wraps for more than two months.

Korea postponed its official signing scheduled for Friday amid criticism that the government surreptitiously handled the highly sensitive first-ever defense pact with Tokyo.

Earlier on Tuesday the opposition Democratic United Party claimed that the Defense Ministry had already initialized the General Security of Military Information Agreement and withheld the fact.

The ministry confirmed the claim, saying the tentative version was signed on April 23 by Brig. Gen. Shin Kyung-soo, deputy chief of the international policy bureau, and Keiichi Ono, Northeast Asia bureau chief of Japan’s Foreign Ministry. Some errors were corrected in the document on May 1, the ministry added.

Officials played down the significance of the provisional step.

“Initialing an agreement is made when working-level officials agree on a draft,” a ministry official said.

He added the government has no obligation to report the initialization of an international pact to the National Assembly.

A government official said Tuesday that Korea will call off discussions on a separate military logistics accord with Japan.

“The two sides have exchanged their own drafts several times, but there was a lot left to discuss and we have yet to produce a joint draft,” the source said. “So the two sides haven’t initiated the pact.”

The government has been under fire from both the ruling and opposition parties for handling the issue hastily and keeping the related procedures secret.

The ministry had originally planned to sign the intelligence sharing pact at the end of May but the process was postponed following criticism from political circles.

However, it was revealed last week that the government approved the pact on June 26 secretly and agreed with Japan to sign it on June 29.

The decision met angry reactions from politicians and civic groups, leading to the cancelation of the signing ceremony slated for Friday.

“The fact that the process was not carried out properly is a very regrettable development,” former Saenuri Party emergency committee chairwoman Park Geun-hye told reporters on Monday.

“The public needs to sympathize (with signing the agreement), and the process should be carried out with transparency.”

Park added that the issue will be discussed by the relevant committees of the National Assembly.

Political parties have vehemently criticized the government claiming that they had been left in the dark.

The government, however, claimed that as the National Assembly had not opened at the time, the issue was explained by Deputy Minister of Defense Lim Kwan-bin to the policy chiefs of the parties on June 21.

Both the Saenuri and the DUP have rebuffed the claims, saying that they were not briefed on the issue.

According to the DUP, Lim declined to answer a question regarding the timeframe the government has set for signing the agreement, and said only that he will report back to the defense minister when party policy chief Lee Yong-sub said that the issue must be discussed by the National Assembly.

The Saenuri Party has also responded in kind to the government’s claims that political parties were briefed on the issue.

“Chief of policy Lim Kwan-bin was making a courtesy call, it was not an occasion for reporting the progress on signing a Korea-Japan military agreement,” a Saenuri Party official said. The official added that the party’s policy chief cut Lim off when the subject was brought up telling the deputy defense minister to report to the appropriate National Assembly committee.

By Choi He-suk
(cheesuk@heraldcorp.com)