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, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during a visit to North Korea’s buffer zone.
Berlin is evaluating how best to support South Korea, he said on Friday. “We will now evaluate this by 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 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement between North and South Korea. It is near the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a “buffer zone” between North and South Korea. South.
“We were photographed from the North Korean side. We photographed the North Korean side,” Pistorius said, adding that soldiers on the other side were just 50 meters away.
“For those who still know 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 about in German-German history,” he said, referring to the division of Germany after the end of the Second World War and the internal German border between East and West.
He said efforts to ensure transparency and prevent an escalation of the situation were “both oppressive and impressive.”
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 testing over the past two years while sharpened his rhetoric against the US and South Korea.
Kim Jong Un, the ruler of North Korea, has repeatedly called for increased preparations for war.
