Scores of South Korean civic group activists gathered in front of the defense ministry’s headquarters on Wednesday, shouting for the embattled president to stop pushing for the U. S. missile shield deployment in their soil and the military intelligence pact with Japan.
A private association aiming to prevent the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), composed of about 100 civic groups, held a press conference in front of the headquarters to protest against the THAAD installation in their homeland and the ongoing discussion between South Korea and Japan to share military intelligence.
Protesters held placards of anti-THAAD and anti-military accord with Japan, screaming for their oppositions to the diplomatic and defense affairs advocated by President Park Geun-hye who is grappling with a political scandal involving her longtime confidante and former aides.
“The Park Geun-hye government already lost credibility and qualification to deal with diplomatic and defense matters as well as domestic affairs,” the association said in its joint statement demanding President Park immediately step down to take responsibility for the scandal.
Park’s decades-long friend, Choi Soon-sil, has been placed under custody on charges of peddling undue influence and meddling in government affairs behind the scenes though Choi has no public position.
The association said the South Korea-Japan military intelligence deal would only serve to build a trilateral missile defense (MD) system in Northeast Asia, strongly demanded by the United States and Japan.
Military and diplomatic officials from South Korea and Japan held their second working-level talks in Seoul on Wednesday after the first dialogue in Tokyo last week on the direct exchange of military intelligence on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Such dialogue was resumed four years after a botched attempt by the Lee Myung-bak government, which pushed to seal the hush-hush military deal with Japan in 2012 to share intelligence on the DPRK’s nuclear and missile programs.
The 2012 attempt, however, failed at the last minutes amid a public outcry over the closed-door deal without any social consensus and parliamentary consultations.
Many South Koreans still see such a deal with Japan as unacceptable as the Japanese leadership has yet to apologizes to and compensate the Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II. The victims are euphemistically called “comfort women.”
Adding to the frenzy, Japan has regularly lodged territorial claims over a set of disputed islets, called Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan. The islets have been controlled by South Korea since its liberation in 1945 from the Japanese colonization.
Concerns arose here about the ongoing push to sign the bilateral military pact rapidly without social consensus. Public attention hasn’t been paid much to the dialogue resumption due to the Choi Soon-sil scandal.
The military intelligence deal with Japan is widely forecast to assist the U. S. pivot-to-Asia strategy and the Japanese ambition to become a regional military powerhouse, together with the THAAD deployment in South Korea.
Seoul and Washington agreed in July to install one THAAD battery in southeastern South Korea by the end of next year, sparking public and parliamentary oppositions to unilateral push without social consensus.
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(Via: NewsGhana)