The foreign ministers of South Korea, China and Japan agreed to work together to hold a trilateral summit at the most “mutually convenient, earliest time” during their first meeting in nearly three years in Seoul on Saturday.
Seoul’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se (middle) and his Chinese and Japanese counterparts, Wang Yi (right) and Fumio Kishida respectively (Yonhap)
When the summit will be held remains unclear, but the agreement is expected to give a much-needed boost to the efforts to restore trilateral regional cooperation that has been undermined due to historical and territorial feuds, Seoul officials said.
“On the occasion of this foreign ministers’ meeting, we hope to move forward toward restoring a trilateral cooperative system,” read a joint press statement issued after the talks among Seoul’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and his Chinese and Japanese counterparts, Wang Yi and Fumio Kishida, respectively.
“We share the understanding that the trilateral cooperative system should remain and be developed as a crucial mechanism to promote peace, stability and prosperity in Northeast Asia.”
Since the trilateral summit was last held in Beijing in May 2012, it has been suspended due to Tokyo’s failure to fully atone for its wartime wrongdoings and territorial spats with South Korea and China. The meeting had been held annually since 2008.
Seoul and Tokyo currently hope for the revival of the summit talks, while Beijing remains cautious over the summit due to historical issues with Tokyo. Observers say that Beijing could agree to or reject the summit depending on the content of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s statement to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in August.
Reflecting Beijing’s cautious stance, the Chinese foreign minister stressed the importance of “coming to grips with history” during a joint news conference.
“The history issue should be (discussed) in the present tense, not in the past tense. We should not drag it into the future (and thus resolve it quickly),” he said, using a set of Chinese phrases that are translated as “face history squarely and chart a future course.”
The joint statement said that based on the shared understanding that they would move forward into the future while facing history, they would work together to strengthen three-way cooperation and improve bilateral relations.
In the statement, the three ministers also reaffirmed their united stance against Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear arms, urging the North to abide by related U.N. Security Council resolutions and other denuclearization commitments that the North has made with the international community.
They agreed to work together for the “meaningful” resumption of the long-stalled six-party denuclearization talks to “achieve a substantive progress” on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The six-way talks that have been stalled since late 2008 involve the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia.
On the sidelines of the trilateral meeting, the ministers held separate bilateral talks.
Before the talks between Yun and the Chinese minister, media attention was focused on whether the two would discuss the U.S.’ possible deployment of an advanced missile defense asset, which Beijing has repeatedly opposed.
But Seoul officials said there was no discussion about the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system. To a reporter’s question of whether there was any discussion on THAAD, Wang Yi said, “We have already expressed our stance repeatedly, and everybody knows it now.”
During the talks between the Korean and Japanese ministers, the two sides agreed to encourage their ministries to pursue progress in their current consultations to resolve the issue of Korean women who were forced into sexual servitude by Japan during World War II.
The two sides have discussed the sexual slavery issue in seven rounds of talks since last April, but have failed to narrow their differences. Seoul has called on Tokyo to take legal responsibilities and sincerely apologize for the wrongdoing, while Tokyo has maintained that every issue concerning its colonization of South Korea had been settled under a 1965 normalization deal.
Meanwhile, President Park Geun-hye called for trilateral cooperation to make progress on the efforts to denuclearize North Korea, during her meeting with the Chinese and Japanese ministers at Cheong Wa Dae.
“Considering that the resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue would help develop a stable inter-Korean relationship and contribute to the stability of Northeast Asia, the three nations need to gather their wisdom to achieve a substantive progress on the denuclearization of the North,” she said.
By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)
