It seems ages since a lingering handshake began across the demarcation line that separates North and South Korea. Much has happened since – and now, the once unthinkable has happened with a summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the US’s Donald Trump. But in all the frenzied coverage of that summit – which yielded an agreement widely considered anaemic – it’s easy to forget that the unprecedented peace process between the Koreas was already underway.
A number of pledges were made at the April 2018 Inter-Korean Summit between Moon Jae-in, president of South Korea, and Kim Jong-un, supreme leader of North Korea. Among their promises were an agreement to work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and to convert the Korean Armistice Agreement into a full peace treaty that would formally end the Korean War after 65 years.
