(Meet the Ambassador) Germany to consider joining UNC 'very seriously' if asked: top envoy

▲ German Ambassador to South Korea Georg Schmidt speaks during an interview with Yonhap News Agency at the ambassador's official residence in Seoul on Nov. 21, 2023. (Yonhap)

▲ German Ambassador to South Korea Georg Schmidt speaks during an interview with Yonhap News Agency at the ambassador's official residence in Seoul, on Nov. 21, 2023. (Yonhap)

(Meet the Ambassador) German ambassador

(Meet the Ambassador) Germany to consider joining UNC 'very seriously' if asked: top envoy

By Kim Seung-yeon

SEOUL, Nov. 23 (Yonhap) -- Germany will have to consider joining the United Nations Command (UNC) "very seriously and carefully" if there is a proposal, its top envoy to South Korea has said, amid talks of the European country being a potential new member of the multinational command that oversees the armistice that halted the 1950-53 Korean War.

Ambassador Georg Schmidt struck a cautious note on the possibility that recently gained traction after South Korea apparently offered to expand the member states during last week's inaugural talks among the defense ministers of South Korea and the UNC members.

The 17-member UNC was established in 1950 to enforce the armistice and serve as a headquarters for potential troop contributions by U.N. sending states in the case of a crisis. The Korean War ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty.

"The UNC is a very unique construction, with the United Nations involvement, with a very strong involvement of the member countries," Schmidt said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency in Seoul on Tuesday.

"If there was an official question, actually, put forward to the German government, and I think this involves many different actors, not just South Korea, but also other actors involved, then we would have to look at it very carefully and consider it very seriously," Schmidt said, without elaborating further.

Germany has come up as a strong candidate as South Korea had previously rejected a U.S.-led push to add the country to the UNC under the preceding liberal Moon Jae-in government over what critics say were its efforts to advance the peace drive with North Korea.

Pyongyang has called for dissolving the UNC, saying it is a source of tension on the Korean Peninsula.

Schmidt, who officially took office in October, noted that South Korea and Germany are in a similar situation amid the U.S.-China rivalry, in which the political value system is more aligned with the U.S. while the economic relationship with China is also important.

Asked to comment on how to deal with the strategic competition between the world's two superpowers, Schmidt called for "not putting all your eggs in one basket."

"There is no blueprint for this. As an internationally open economy, we will always be vulnerable and always be dependent," he said.

"So how do we adapt to that? There is a very important concept of de-risking. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, don't rely too much on one supplier of goods."

Rearranging the economic relationships in that way would create new opportunities for cooperation between South Korea and Germany, Schmidt said.

"I think Germany and the EU as a whole should be a very attractive market to see the potential to just spread your eggs and more baskets," he said.

Germany is "following very closely" the unfolding military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, the ambassador said, calling for international efforts to appeal to third parties, like China, under the U.N. sanctions regime.

"For Europe, sanctions are always a European matter, not one nation-state's on its own," Schmidt said.

"It's important that we raise it to the Chinese side. ... All actors should make sure that the tensions are not being escalated again," he said.

On North Korea's human rights issues, Schmidt made a reference to the history of his own country as once a divided nation and the Holocaust, and highlighted the importance of collecting information to raise accountability.

"We tried to document what is happening even if we could not really use the documents immediately. East Germany was never happy with us documenting it," he said, adding that efforts should continue to raise the problems of and condemn the abuses at all multinational fora available.

As a new ambassador to South Korea, Schmidt said he wants to broaden the scope of diplomacy to many parts of the regions in South Korea "beyond the capital," expressing hope to deepen ties through more people-to-people exchanges, especially in common social challenges shared by both countries.

"Korea is much more than Seoul, and I would love to reach out more to different regions. I feel there is a very strong German-Korean people-to-people network," he said.

"We have, in our societies, a huge change going on, talk about demographic change, talk about the role of women, talk about the role of work," Schmidt said. "I would love to bring these up more on the agenda for Germans and Koreans who face similar problems and talk a lot more about this."

(END)

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