South Korea has no immediate plan to push for a military acquisition pact with Japan although it could be necessary in the long term, Seoul’s defense ministry said Monday.
The Japanese daily Nikkei reported on Sunday that Tokyo is gearing up to sign the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement with South Korea in a move to strengthen security ties with the neighbor.
“(South Korea) has not discussed the issue of signing the ACSA with Japan recently and has no such plan for now,” defense ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said at a regular briefing.
“We feel it’s necessary to sign the pact, for example, to help in cases of launching overseas peacekeeping operations, but our judgment is that now is not the appropriate time to sign it considering diverse pending bilateral issues,” he said, without further elaboration.
The long-strained relations between South Korea and Japan have taken a turn for the worse in recent weeks over Japan’s renewed claim to South Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo and its refusal to apologize for the wartime atrocities, including the forced enslavement of Asian women, mostly Koreans, for its World War II soldiers.
Korea was under harsh colonial rule by Japan from 1910-45.
Japan has the ACSA, which provides a framework for logistics cooperation between armed forces, with major global powers, including the United States and Australia.
Kim also reiterated the government’s position that no discussions have been made for a possible bilateral meeting between the two defense ministers on the sidelines of the upcoming Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual regional defense ministers’ talks slated for next month in Singapore.
Despite the soured ties over territorial and historical issues, South Korea has been working to boost defense cooperation with Japan in a limited fashion under the trilateral cooperative mechanism that involves the U.S. In December last year, the three nations signed the arrangement on sharing their sensitive military information on North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats. (Yonhap)
