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The 2017 Seoul Defense Dialogue during September of last year
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North Korea declines to attend multilateral security meeting of vice defense ministers
The Seoul Defense Dialogue (SDD), an annual multilateral security meeting at the vice defense minister level, kicks off its three-day schedule in Seoul on Sept. 12. North Korea, which had been the focus of attention in the lead-up, will not be attending. In informational materials on the dialogue published on Sept. 4, the South Korean Ministry of National Defense said the event will have “the most participants in its history at 52 (48 states and four international organizations), with defense officials at the vice minister level attending for the first time from the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.” China also plans to send a nine-member delegation including Academy of Military Medical Sciences political committee member Liu Maojie, which a ministry official suggested signals a recovery in South Korea-China relations. But North Korea did not accept its invitation. The invitation was extended during an inter-Korean general officer-level meeting at Panmunjeom on July 31, where the South Korean Ministry of National Defense asked the North Korean side to “send a vice minister-level official from the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces to attend the Seoul Defense Dialogue.” According to the ministry, North Korea obliquely declined the request in an Aug. 25 notice, stating that the “North and South [Korean] militaries should now be doing their parts for implementation of the historic Panmunjeom Declaration.” The invitation for North Korea to attend the SDD – an annual event first held in 2012 – was the second, after a previous one during the Park Geun-hye administration in 2015. At the time, Pyongyang issued a statement in the name of its Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland secretariat in which it said that “the very idea of South Korea holding a defense dialogue is disgusting, when it threatens peace through its antagonisms in collusion with the US and its machinations for an invasion of the North and nuclear war.” This year’s dialogue, the seventh overall, adopts the theme “Sustainable Peace: From Conflict to Cooperation” and will include broad discussions of various international security matters including Korean Peninsula issues, maritime security, and cybersecurity, the Ministry of National Defense said. The opening ceremony is to include an opening address by Minister of National Defense Song Young-moo and a keynote speech by Blue House National Security Office director Chung Eui-yong. By Park Byong-su, senior staff writer Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
