The two Koreas have signed a landmark deal that holds out the promise of ushering in peace in the peninsula. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-il concluded a historic three day summit with a joint declaration calling for peace talks to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War with a treaty. The two Koreas remain technically at war with each other since no peace treaty but only an armistice came into effect in 1953. The proposed treaty will bring to a formal end the 1950-53 war. The ceasefire agreement will be replaced with a formal peace treaty.

Relations between North and South Korea have been fraught with tension in the decades since the two countries were caught in the cold war. However, the relationship began changing in the 1990s when South Korea initiated a conciliatory “Sunshine Policy’ towards its northern neighbour. In 2000, bilateral relations reached an important milestone when the leaders of the two countries met for the first summit ever; the just-concluded meet is the second summit between the two countries. Over the past few years, reunions between divided families have taken place and economic co-operation has grown. Such efforts at reconciliation suffered setbacks however when North Korea flexed its military muscle with its nuclear and missile tests. While these tests were aimed more at sending out signals to the United States rather than intimidating Seoul, this injected an element of insecurity in the peninsula.

A thaw in frosty relations was evident at the summit. With their declaration, North and South Korea have signalled that they want to put their conflict-ridden past behind them and build a new tomorrow. But peace in the Korean peninsula will be possible only if the US, China, Russia and Japan back the effort. The US has already said that a peace treaty and normalisation of US-North Korea relations is conditional, among other things, on Pyongyang dismantling its nuclear weapons programme. While the international community has some valid concerns over North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons especially in the context of the unstable situation in that country, the peace process that the two Koreas are interested in cannot be held hostage to Washington’s concerns. The quest for a permanent peace is what the two Koreas want and the international community should support that, whether or not it meets their interests.