SEOUL -- Although the recent agreement between North and South Korea to set up a hotline, a shared radio frequency and a mutually recognizable naval signaling system to avoid future West Sea clashes -- which claimed scores of lives in 1999 and 2002 -- is certainly good news, it treats the symptoms and not the cause of tensions.
The Northern Limit Line, or NLL, is flawed as a final maritime boundary. The line veers sharply northwestward separating five tiny South Korean-held islands from the larger North Korean-held Ongjin Peninsula, effectively boxing in both naval and fishing fleets and denying them legitimate access to their territorial seas and their respective exclusive economic zones, or EEZ, beyond. And while delegations to these first-of-a-kind negotiations slipped across each other's east coast borders with relative ease to meet at the North's Mount Kumgang and the South's Mount Seorak, they are only a start.
It is worth pondering the irony that the Mount Kumgang complex -- which was originally built by Hyundai for South Korean tourist visits, is an important source of revenue for the North and has served as the venue for inter-Korean family visits -- has now been put to yet another useful purpose in the expanding web of inter-Korean relations. A further irony is that the NLL was originally conceived as a way of keeping South Korean forces from venturing north to recapture the Ongjin Peninsula, as then-South Korean President Syngman Rhee threatened to do many times between 1953 and 1960. It was South Korean territory at the onset of the Korean War.