After joining the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) in South Korea, Germany is prepared in principle to provide personnel to monitor the ceasefire on the Korean peninsula, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said during a visit to the buffer zone to North Korea.
Berlin is weighing how best to support South Korea, he said on Friday. “We will now sound this out until the end of the year and then move on to the next phase,” he said at the Camp Bonifas military base.
Camp Bonifas is home to the UNC, which monitors the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953 between North and South Korea. It is close to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a “buffer zone” between North Korea and South Korea.
“We were photographed by the North Korean side. We photographed the North Korean side,” Pistorius said, adding that soldiers from the other side were just some 50 metres away.
“For someone who still knows the German-German border, there are many associations and at the same time it is very different, because there is this buffer zone, which we don’t know from German-German history,” he said, referring to the division of Germany after the end of World War II and the inner German border between East and West.
He said the endeavours to ensure transparency and prevent an escalation in the situation were “both oppressive and impressive at the same time.”
Germany became the 18th country to join the UNC on Friday, a step that comes amid rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula after Pyongyang significantly expanded its missile tests over the past two years, while sharpening its rhetoric against the US and South Korea.
Kim Jong Un, the ruler of North Korea, has repeatedly called for increased war preparations.
