Last month, Defence Minister Judith Collins and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters announced the deployment of 53 NZ Defence Force staff to South Korea. This was followed a week later by Prime Minister Luxon announcing twice-yearly visits by the P8-A Poseidon surveillance aircraft and by the naval tanker Aotearoa to Japan to monitor North Korea shipping.

The claim that these NZDF deployments will contribute to regional; peace and security, are simply not true according to Peter Wilson, Secretary of the NZ DPRK Society.

“On the contrary,” he says, “the risk of war is increased, not decreased.”

Seared into the North Korean memory is the near total flattening of their country by 625,000 tonnes of bombs in the 1950s. They do not want this to happen again. Threatened by 28,000 American troops and regular war games in South Korea practising invasion manoeuvrers, North Korea has retaliated by developing the strongest defensive deterrent possible – a nuclear capability.

As a recent paper published by the Seoul-based East Asia Foundation* points out that having achieved an effective defence capability, North Korea is reducing the size of the People’s Army and focusing on economic development for the improvement of people’s lives. Large numbers of military personnel are being assigned to civil construction duties.

“Now that we have our nuclear deterrent, we can afford to use our labour more productively,” a senior Pyongyang civil servant told a visiting NZ DPRK Society group in 2017.

As Kim Jong-un said in January: “There is no reason to choose war, and therefore there is no intention to unilaterally initiate it, but if war comes to us as a reality, we will never try to avoid it.”

Over the past two years, military camps in North Hamgyong, South Hamgyong and Pyongyang Provinces have been converted into large horticultural Greenhouse Farms. Troops from these former military installations have been assigned to the 124th Regiment which is now stationed in 20 different regions where they are building houses, factories, roads and hydro dams.

These are not the actions of a country planning to go to war.

“It is crazy that the NZ Government is committing millions of dollars of unnecessary spending at a time when the NZDF is reportedly sacking civilian staff to meet a $30million deficit.” says Wilson, “we have 74 years of history to tell us that the military do not have an answer to the Korean impasse.”

Since conservative Yoon Suk-yeol became President in 2022, his hard right policies have triggered an arms race between South and North, leading to the greatest risk of war breaking out again since 1953.”

Instead of increasing this risk and aggravating the situation by contributing to the dangerous arms race, NZ should withdraw all military support and devoting a fraction of expenditure saved on diplomacy, advocating for peace talks attended by all parties to the war, as provided for in Clause 60 of the 1953 Armistice Agreement.

Only diplomacy and dialogue can solve the Korean situation, not military input.

*https://www.keaf.org/en/book/EAF_Policy_Debates/Does_North_Korea_Really_Want_a_War

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